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DREAMS

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This U the flip side of Computer Lib .

(Peel free to begin here. The other aide
ie Juet if you went to know more ebout computers,
which ere changeable devices for twiddling sym¬
bol*. Otherwise skip it.)

(But if you change your mind it might
be fun to browse.)

In a sense, the other aide has been a
come-on for this side. But it's sn honest come*
on: I figure the more you know, the readier
you'll be for what I'm saying here. Not neces¬
sarily to agree or be "sold,” but to think about
it in the non-simple terms that are going to be
necessary.

The material here has been chosen largely
for its exhilarating and inspirational character.

No matter what your background or technical
knowledge, you'll be able to understand some of
this, and not be able to understand some of the
rest. That’s partly from the hasty preparation
of this book, and partly from the variety of in¬
terests I'm trying to comprise here. I want to
present various dreams and their resulting dream
machines . all legitimate .

If the computer is a projective system, or
Rorschach Inkblot, bb alleged on the other side,
the real projective systems-- the ones with pro¬
jectors in them-- are all the more so. The things
people try to do with movies, TV and the more
glamorous uses of the computer, whereby it makes
pictures on screens-- are strange inversions
and foldovers of the rest of the mind and heart.
That's the peculiar origami of the self.

Very well. This book-- this side. Dream
Machines -- is meant to let you see the choice
of dreams. Noting that every company and uni¬
versity seems to insist that its system is the
wave of the future, i think it is more important
than ever to have the alternatives spread out
clearly.

But the "experts" arc not going to be much
help; they are part of the problem. On both
sides, the academic and the industrial, they are
being painfully pontifical and bombastic in the
jarring new jargons (sec "Babels in Toyland,"
p. *7 ). Little clarity is spread by this. Few
things are funnier than the pretensions of those
who profess to dignity, sobriety and profession¬
alism of their expert predictions - especially
when they, too are pouring out their own personal
views under the guise of technicality . Most peo¬
ple don’t dream of what’s going to hit the fan.

And the computer and electronics people are like
generals preparing for the last war.

Frankly. 1 think it’s an outrage making it
look as if there's any kind of scientific basiB to
these things; there is an underlevel of technicality,
but like the foundation of a cathedral, it serves
only to support what rises from it. THE TECH¬
NICALITIES MATTER A LOT, BUT THE UNIFYING
VISION MATTERS MORE.

Technology fs an expression of man's dreams. If man did
not Indulge his fantasies, hts thoughts alone would inhibit the
development of technology itself. Ancient visionaries spoke of
distant times and places, where men flew around and about, and
some could see each other at great distance. The technological
realities of today are already obsolete and the future of
technology Is bound only by the limits of our dreams. Modern
cofimunl cat ions media and in particular electronic media are
outgrowths and extensions of those senses which have become
dominant In our social development.

Hon yachapret8 , "Hyper-Reality . "
(£) Auditaa Ltd. II?}.

cqiiwH

JtlL

{W.

Ladies and gentlemen. the a(r of
prealidifitAlnre presentation and pub¬
lishing U about to begin. Palpitating
presentation*, screen.scribbled, will
dance to your detire, making manl¬
iest the many mysteries ol winding
wisdom But il we are to rehumanize

an increasingly brutal and disagree¬
able world, we must step up our
efforts And we must hurry. Hurry.

Step right up.

Theodbr" H. Ueleon,
"Bamum-Tronice."
Suarthnore 'ol lego
Alurmi Bulletin,
"When you're Geo 1970, 12-15.
dealing with media you're in ibow builnctt. you
know, whether you like it or not'

“Show botincM," he takl. 'Absolutely. We've gotta
he in tliow bminest. We've gotta pul together a team
that will get ut there"

I made n mental note to air the show burinra me¬
taphor again, and continued. "IBM's real creative tal¬
ii it pi iiii.il ily 1M in other areas.. .*

Ileynood Gould, Corporation
Freak (Toner), 23.

Tim Great Robert Crumb,
t From Zap Com'Cx »(J. )

f[» mort *< *iore t»e4r-

jfC* m»n 1 t*ciesr'J,rfj far.

-we 6cmu, DMJtsruToj,
IS HOT 'W OUR STAfc/
Bor ouitscLv*j.

This book has several simultaneous inten¬
tions: to orient the beginner In fields more
complex and tied together than almost anybody
realizes; nevertheless, to partially debunk
several realms of expertise which 1 think de¬
serve slightly less attention than they get;
and to chart the right way, which I think uniquely
continues the Western traditions of literature,
scholarship and freedom. In this respect the
book Is much more old-fashoned than It may seem
at the gee-whiz, very-now level.

The main Ideas of this book I present not
as my own, but as a curious species of revealed
truth. It has all been obvious to me for some
time, and I believe It should be obvious as well
to anyone who has not been blinded by education.

If you understand the problems of creative think¬
ing and organizing ideas, if you have seen the
had things school so often does to people, if
you understand the sociology of the intellectual
world, and have ever loved a machine, then this
book says nothing you do not know already.

For every dream, meny details and intri¬
cacies have to be whittled and interlocked. Their
Joint ramlflcatlona must be deeply understood by
the person who is trying to creste whstever-lt-is.
Each confabulation of possibilities turns out to
hive the most intricate snd exactly detailed rcsulte.
(This is why I am so irritated by those who think
"electronic media" are all alike,)

And each possible combination you choose
has different precise structures implicit in it.
arrangements and units which flow from these
ramified details. Implicit in Radio lurk the
Time Slot and the Program. But many of these
possibilities remain unnoticed or unseen, for ■
variety of social or economic reasons.

Why does it matter’

It matters because we live in media, ae
fish live in water. (Many people are prisoner*
of the media, many are manipulators, and many
want to use them to communicate artistic visions.)

But todsy, at this moment, we can and must
design the media, design the molecules of our
new water, and I believe the details of this design
matter very deeply. They will be with us for a
very long time, perhaps ss long as man has left;
perhaps if they are aa good as they can be, man
may even buy more lime-- or the open-ended
future most suppose remains. (See "Endgame,"
p. C? .)

So in these pages 1 hope to orient you some¬
what to various of the proposed dreams. This is
meant also to record the effortB of a few Brewster
McClouds, each tinkering toward some new flight
of fancy in his own sensoarium.

But bear in mind that hard-edged fantasy
is the corner of tomorrow. The great American
dream often becomes the great American novelty.
After which it’s a choice of style, size and fin¬
ancing plan.

The most exciting things here are those
that involve computers: notably, because compu¬
ters will embraced in every presentational medium
and thoughtful medium very soon.

That’s why this side is wedded to the other:
if you want to understand computers, you can take
the first step by turning the book over. I figure
that the more you know about computers-- especial¬
ly about minicomputers and the way on-line sys¬
tems can respond to our slightest acts-- the better
your imagination can flow between the technicali¬
ties, can slide the parts together, can discern the
shapes of what you would have these things do.

The computer is not a limitless partner, but it is
deeply versatile; to work with it we must under¬
stand what it can do, the options and the coats.

My special concern, all too tightly framed
here, is the use of computers to help people
write, think and show. But 1 think presentation
by computer is a branch of show biz and writing,
not of psychology , engineering or pedagogy.

This would be idle disputation if it did not have
far-reaching consequences for the designs of the
systems we are all going to have to live with.

At worst, l fear these may lock us in; at best,

1 hope they can further the individualistic tradi¬
tions of literature, film and scholarship. But
we must create our brave new worlds with art,
zest, intelligence. and the highest possible ideals.

1 have not mentioned the emotiona. Movies
and books, music and even architecture have for
all of us been part of important emotional moments.
The same is going to happen with the new media.

To work at a highly responsive computer display
screen, for instance, can be deeply exciting,
like flying an airplane through a canyon, or
talking to somebody brilliant. This is as it
should be. ("The reason is, and by rights ought
to be. slave to the emotions." - Bertrand Russell.)

In the design of our future media and sys
terns, we should not shrink from this emotional
aspect aa a legitimate part of our fantic (see p.

) design. The substratum of technicalities
and the mind-bending, gut-slamming effects they
produce, are two sides of the same coin; and to
understand the one is not necessarily to be
alienated from the other.

Thus it is far the Wholiness of the human
apirit, that we muat design.

(c° V£ S)

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AUTHOR’S COUNTERCULTURE CREDENTIALS

Writer, showman, generalist. Gemini, moon in Libra, Gemini rising.

One \me seventh-grade dropout. 1 have relatively little interest in improving the educational system within the existing framework.

Author of what may have been world's first rock musical, "Anything 4 Everything." Swarthmore College. November 1957 (with Richard L. Caplan).
olographer for a year at Dr. Lilly's dolphin lab (Communication Research Institute. Miami. Florida). Attendee of the Great Woodstock Faatival
(like many others), and it changed my life (as others have reported). What we are all looking for is not where we thought it was
I elong media nut. Magazine collector; hung around TV studios as s child. Compulsive explainer. Gimmicist by disposition, computerman by accideatlny.

Lit

irem.

<5urri£MEUT

TO THC THIltj) rtiNWGr

II 7 S.

Gee whiz, folks, here we are at another prin¬
ting and already the big clock on the wall tell,
us that another year has gone by.

This supplement is mainly things that had to
be mentioned, but it kind of assume, you We read
the book itself or are generally

computers. BOOKSTORE BROWSERS: avoid these four
pages. NEW OWNER OF THE BOOK: Check that the
pages are right, riyit,

SORRY THE TYPE STILL ISN'T BIGGER, but that
will require thousands of bucks in new negatives—
meaning a lot more have to be sold »s is.

The redoubtable PCC is now six issues and six

dollars a year. People's Computer Company,
P.O.Box 310, Menlo Park CA 94025.

BYTE Magazine, $ 10/year if you hurry, $12 later,
from Creen Publishing Co., Peterborough, NH.
Editorial: Carl Helmers, Box 378, Belmont
MA 02178. Hardware-oriented.

Creative Computing : The Magazine of Recreational
and Educational Computing . Ideametrlcs,

P.O. Box 789-M, Morristown, NJ )7960. Weird
variety of subscription rates: student $6,
"individual" $8, "institutional" $15.

The Computer Hobbyist , $6/year. Box 295, Cary NC
27511. Hardware-oriented.

Computer Notes (for Altair users; from M1TS).

Micro-8 Newsletter , for people really into the
Intel. Hal Singer, Cabrillo High School,

4350 Constellation, Lompoc CA 93436.

and also

Simulation and Gaming News, Box 3039 University
Station, Moscow, Idaho 83843,

Electronotes is the magazine for music synthesizer
freaks. Bernle Hutchins, 60 Sheraton Drive,
Ithaca NY 14850.

and something else entirely.

Privacy Journal , a monthly newsletter on problems
of privacy, many or most of which involve
computers. P.O. Box 8844, Washington, D.C.
20003; $15 a year.

(Note: it is of interest that a bill on computer
privacy in this year's House of Represen¬
tatives Just happened to be HR 1984.)

One individual I know, who relishes his
counterculture image, told me with angry and
shaking voice that he doesn't believe in copy¬
right and that anything that gets near his
computer belongs to him . Well, don't leave
your manuscripts near such a person. (Why is
it always the guys with cushy and secure jobs
who tell you tveedle de dee, ideas should be
free, and patents and copyrights are selfish?)

Actually, for the individual, one of the
strongest forms of protection available is
copyright. Far from obsolete, the copyright
makes publishing, and the betrer computer
software, possible. (It is not generally
known that copyright violation is a felony .)

(And ripping off a program you're supposed to
pay for is not a brave guerrilla affirmation,
like hitting Harold Geneen with a pie, but
grand larceny.)

Now that Altairs and LSI-1Is have got a
lot of you guys dreaming about selling soft¬
ware, an important question is how to protect
your work. Well, you have a champion.

Calvin Mooers (see pp. 18-21) is not only
a genuine Computer Pioneer From The Forties,
but, along with Herb Grosch, pioneered the
Computer Counterculture. Grosch flaunted a
beard in front of old man Watson, Mooers
strove to make computers easy to use— back
when that was unheard of.

One of his current interests is in ways
that small independent underground-type pro¬
grammers can protect their developments. He
and some associates are exploring the possi¬
ble formation of a group for the legal pro¬
tection of small software producers and owners.

Incidentally, when you think something
you've written belongs to you— a computer
program, poem or whatever— slap the following
at the beginning, under the title:

substituting, of course, your own name. And
the year currently in effect. If computer prin¬
ting is used, (C), using parentheses, is consi¬
dered an acceptable substitute for c-in-a-circle.

This not only gives notice to potential
Borrowers, but it has certain strong magical
properties as a legal incantation. See your
lawyer for details, but don't hesitate to apply
it liberally to your own work; you may be glad
you did.

A lot of copies of this book have not been put together correctly.
We hope that's all ovar now, but If this book belongs to you

please check it. Incorrectly-made books will be exchanged,
within two weeks of purchase (address on p. 2). Otherwise
you have a Collector's Item. Q ^ /

ALL YOU NEED DO IS CHECK THE NUMBERS ON THE 'COMPUTER LIB' SIDE.
They run straight through from cover to cover, even thouqh
the contents flip capriciously. If the letters "OM” appear
anywhere amongst these plain numbers, you got a lemon.

Tiie Aim swcr

It began with a bang last Christmas: the
cover of Popular Electronics showed 'a computer
you dan build yourself for only $400'!

It was real. A young firm in Albuquerque
called Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Sys¬
tems, or MITS, had finally done it: a computer
for well under $1000. In a box not much bigger
than a typewriter, a machine comparable to the
Univac I. They called it the Altair 8800.

Of course, In a way this was an obvious
Btep. The MITS computer was simply the pack¬
aging, as a computer, of a specific integrated
circuit chip that had been on the market for
some months. This chip, the Intel 8080, is a
microprocessor, or two-level computer (see p.
44), generally employed for fixed purposes in
cash registers, pinball machines, and the like.
However, to make It a "general" computer— with
the engineering, hookups and accessories that
entailed— would be no small c-atter if taken
seriously. ^ ^ „!,**)

Next in computer hobbyism will
obviously be the Computer Van.
Already vane come with swivel
thrones, four-track stereo,
color TV; so this next step
is obvious. But most important,
recreational vehicles can be
purchased on very long time-
plans, sometimes seven years.
(HITS has a detno van with Al¬
tair, floppy disk, lineprinter.
It drives around showing off.

But they'll sell you one like
it for a trifling $20,000.)

Now for mobile operation we
redo the power supply...

1975 may be thought of as the year in which
the computer underground suddenly appeared In
full force. The Altair was probably the big
crystallizing event.

Not that there wasn't a counterculture be¬
fore. There were the games-players at every uni¬
versity, the prank programmers (see p. 40-9), and,
wherever computers are the center of things, a
shared experience of miscb^ief and breakthrough.
There was Computer People for Peace, a cliquey
and unapproachable group with booths at the con¬
ferences (at least, their backs were always
turned when you wanted to ask questions). There
was the hobby fringe.

But now it's gone different. Instead of
pretentious company names meant to appeal bo ob¬
tuse businessmen, like Performance Measurement
Systems Consultants Group and Bottom-Line-Tronics,
the new companies have rock-group names like
General Turtle, Inc., The Sphere and Loving Grace
Cybernetics. In this new computer counterculture,
the main computer companies are not IBM and
Honeywell and Univac, but DEC and MITS and Gen¬
eral Turtle; the standard computer is not the 370,
but the 11 (or possibly the Altair or the 8) .

The standard language is not Fortran or Algol or
PL/I, but BASIC. Instead of the big color TV
that middle America wants, the underground compu-
ternik dreams of his own graphic setup forever
running The Game of Life in color (see pp. 48-9
and pic p. DM26). (Of course that'll also re¬
quire the color TV; see "Bit Maps,” p. Z.)

In such a world, computers are not a tool
but a way of life. The computer is toy, pet,
checkerboard, music box and TV. Computers are
for making music, computers are for getting people
together via community memory, computers are for
letter-writing, computers are for art and movie¬
making and the animated decoration of the home.

Computers are for games; a vast number of
interactive game-programs are published and
swapped around. Almost all are in the BASIC
language. (Bob Albrecht's WHAT TO DO AFTER YOU
HIT RETURN is said to be definitive— S7.50 from
People's Computer Company, 1919 Menalto Ave.,

Menlo Park CA 94025. See also their magazine
PCC , as well as Simulation and Gaming News.)

PLATO games, a somewhat different subspecies, are
discussed on p. DM27.

The underground computer magazines have be¬
come a blizzard (see box). Albrecht's sprightly
and successful PCC , originally oriented toward
high and grade schools, has now branched into
hobbyism as well. On the hardware side there is
The Computer Hobbyist , and now a slick new hobby
magazine, Byte , with a first printing of 50,000.

On the educational side there is a swell new
magazine called Creative Computing .

Then there is the Community Memory movement.
The basic idea of Community Memory is to have a
computer resource of information and ideas, com¬
monly available. In its more glorified and mys¬
tical form, the idea seems to be to have a place,
inside the computer, where information can be
shared by The People, free of institutional ob¬
struction or the profit motive.

This vision is perhaps unclear to others
besides the author, but it attracts a variety of
people interested in some form of grass roots
revitalization of our society. Some of these are
disillusioned sixties radicals who look to "com¬
munity organization" as a building block for a
new society; others are interested in more nuts-
and-bolts applications, such as trying to make
barter a viable economic form again, in an urban
society with many nonstandard leftovers, skills
and wants. (Presumably this would work by having
the computer find pairs of people with matching
wants and tradables; or even search out potential
trades around multi-person rings.)

The first of these systems was Resource One,
in San Francisco; I saw another Community Memory
in Vancouver, which seemed to be in practice a
sort of animated classified-ad system. A user
Bitting at the terminal can put in ads of his own,
and can search through the entire file for key¬
words of interest. As there is no censorship,
some rather surprising things get in there, for
which I wish we had room.

(A newsletter of such projects, Conmunity
Communications , is being started by Lee Felsen-
stein, Loving Grace Cybernetics, 1807 Delaware St.,
Berkeley CA 94703.)

Even for those coming anew into the field—
the radio hams and amateur telescope makers who've
laid their Master Charge cards on the line for the
Altair— computers represent a new social life.
Amateur computer clubs have drawn startling num¬
bers: for instance, the Los Angeles and San Fran¬
cisco groups are currently pulling 100 members to
their weekly meetings. (In San Francisco, con¬
tact Fred Moore, 558 Santa Cruz Avenue, Manlo
Park CA 94025.)

This book and its surprise success probably
rate mention of some sort in the world of under¬
ground computerdom, '74-75; although my under¬
ground status may be in jeopardy. I had intended
to bypass the computer establishment, and cer
tainly not expected to become assimilated therein;
so the dozens of university class adoptions have
come as a considerable shock, as have the accep¬
tance and legitimation I had long since given up
on. My heartfelt thanks for this response, and
I'll try to live up to it. ( Ho* i“ discussed on
p. Z, last column.)

But folks, this all is the merest beginning.

Ae it saye on diametrically the other side, p. 3,

COMPUTERS BELONG TO ALL MANKIND.

(19 Zl

OfaTf

PAGe

• • • • •

BIG SfPTHef,

^Nj>^-ne-r$*r

d.rtwy" 11 '" •" » v **» rd <tut, opposl"g lead
attorneys accused each other of professional
misconduct, placing both men's «<MI under *
cloud »■ the f »« ht

th« ««y 1C c < p m through In th« tr«4* pr«**
tha Gowsrnmeflt MOM to fa* pulling punch— and
>i»lt« th* point Of what It* own *ltn**M»—r-

It Ur

CosqnJlsr Industry Association, or ISM-hat:
club. of for* transcript* of th* IBM trial,
Mil ■> daily itHitlH. Th* 9 rot
t*r> in now at 1911 X. fort Keye:

Mhat

s th* point of It *117
1* ***kin 9 to break up I

ITT- liartford business.)

Thor* 1* • lot of *up*r*titloo »faout I HI
In th* land. Th* stock aarlat toot a hug* dive
wtMn th* Justice Department announced It Mould
pro**eut*. hut why? H*ah wiener, editor of
Ccwmtar Decisions■ think* IHI will fa* brok*n
upi *Tha Jostle* Department want* It, and 1HI
want* It, and th* stockholders will eaks won
*on*y. They've already drawn th* dotted linas."

A k*y question 1* whet difference It would
oak*. is—her shet happened after they broke
up Standard 0117 Mot euch-l A phony hreakup
would *l**ly —k* th* different division* Into
different «-pan!**, leaving tha product 11 m
and th* cooperation intact! a oor* effective
■pill would in eoM way fostar competition
among th* daughter corporation*. But what way7

On* of I HI* * nor* r*c*nt trick* 1* to
or.rwh*!* litiqstor* by th* quantity of doc-
unant* tuppllad, nany of which ar* stored on
computer* In full-t**t fons. To give you an
Idas of tha humungous magnitude* involved, some
figures Just came up In recent litigation with
Senders Associate*. Sanders Is suing last, and
recently asked 1M how many doci»ent* IH1 had
that w»r* 'partinant' to th# cas*. Th* reply:
'Active file*, approximately 906,014,000 pagesl
Inactive file., approxlnatsly 421,(60.000 P*9**.‘
( 0 *tarnation , July 71, p. 129.) An unfortunate
aftermath of a suit by Control Data, In which
IBM settled, mi th* destruction of th* greet In¬
dexes which had baan constructed to tha vaat fil*
of IP's record*t th* indax Is gone and unsvsll-
abla for thi* cas*.

To a lot of people thi* Just sew to have
to do with th* else of on* corporation. In th*
author*■ opinion, howavar, th# l*su* 1* th* on#
big usual question, the l**u* of freedom in our
time: and that 1* not a mat tar of bignass, but
tha styla of IfaX'a control. Computars should
sake things sasiar in both our work and our pri-
vat* llvas, and should help lighten our loads
and anlightsn our minds, clarifying th* cosplex-
lties of everything. Unfortunately. IM't method
of staking money has a littls too much to do with
creating rigid and oppressive and pointleaaly
ccMplex lyitmi, fobbing thaw off as 'scisntlfic, *
and ensnaring its customars in complications by
tha techniques discussed on pp. 12-66.

People should b* free to uaa computars as
they ought to be used, each In his personal style
regardless of his job title, smldst rushing menu*
of option* snd clarifying screen graphics, rsthar
than each parson and office worker being locked
Into his own "sternly allotted sandplls,* as
namings put it. And that is th* problem.

able to report In future edition* of thla book
that ml has moved firmly and credibly toward
making Its system* clear and sl^le to us*, with¬
out requiring laborious attention to noodle* com¬
plication* and oppressive ritual*.’

This has in fact occurred, and 1 so report.

In an earth-shaking announcement in January,
ISM totally reversed th* policy of it* cxMputer
division for th* laat ten year*. Tat eo jaded is
th* press that thi* event was not, 1 think, pro¬
perly raoognlied.

Astounding s* It may be from the company that
gave tha world JC1. and 'ha MT/ST, In January IHI
stepped into th* world of MI) CO—'Uter., bringing
out the iystem/32, a mlnlcosputar for bualnes*.

You can only rant it as *n interactive terminal,
with a program created by IHI which cannot b# modi¬
fied (celled an Industry Application Package or
IAF). hut those little progrems prompt user*
*t*p-by-*tep through what they ar* supposed to b#
doing, and apprantly are very clear snd helpful
for th* naive.

This about-face Is In many way* gratifying
for those of us who have bean advocating easy,
screen-based systems for year* and yaara. kt long
last it gives IHI’* 'legitisMcy' to minicomputers
for business, and it help* companies that already
provide such ssrvicss, such a* Baalc/rour.

It will be interesting to see if IHI know.
hom to make things simple, considering th* exper¬
ience they have lavished on the opposite policy.
Anyway, with this mov* I would say that IBM has
purged itself of at least 20t of Its discernible
evil. If this begins s real change.

A delicate probl— will restrict th* impact
of th* 32 itself, however. That Is that thH wants
It used only si s gateway to Its Mj computers:
prssiaasbly, If users war* altowad to program it,
they'd find way* out of having to use th* blggia.

WAT UOL J* HtkT?

As It happens, w* know what I Bn 1 a biggest
nsxt mov. will be. It la sow.thing to be callsd
tha Putura Systm* (rsl. PS will be a cocq> 1st*
line of co—Altars and crxssnmi cat Ions technique,
for them, but that's *11 we know: security it
vary tight- Supposedly fS exists and Is running:
but what l£ it? All we know is that Its schsd-
uled Introduction hat been pushed back from 1976
to sometime after I960.

Anyway, I hsv* asked a lot of savvy people
what they thought PS was going to ba, and her.

•re some of th* answers:

k completely modular line

terminals with a Unlbva-type architec¬
ture. (RtimoRi this would eliminate
sre, CEs end System* Analysts. Thu*
th* postponement.)

A nlcrprogmad line of equipment, whose

A totally Pl/I system.

A line of equipment with ever-changing

mlcroprogrmnad "fen-dance" interfaces,

t what they era. (A
charge by barb Groech and numerous
peripheral manufacturers.)

A complete and impregnable total ays ten for
all symbolic information, which can
only be keyed into through IBM terminal*,
processed on IBM computers, trsn— itted
through IBM satellites, end read out
through IBM terminal.. (PACT: IBM has
eppllad for a satellite.)

Totally CO—mtlbls with existing 370 hardware.

Totally incompatible with existing 370 hard¬
ware, but software-convertible. (IBM
makes a lot of money on adapters and
conversion*.)

A line of pockat-sized and portable equipment
built around Magnetic Bubble Technology.

A line Of sasy-to-uae equipment V1 th easy-to-
use interactive software. (This would
suddenly eliminate hundreds of thousands
of progreamars. but IBM doesn't owe than
anything.)

"Kan, Whatever It Is, it'll be sick."

ner.cy Toy, The Gun never Sets

viewsd at prass time.

William Badgers' Think is out
•n idded chapter, from th
Library.

Datamation devoted large sections of It* February
and March ‘76 Issue* to material on the IBM
Problms.

THeJifrDC ,

1 - th: a Whocr-er:

HAJOB PREMISE. "Computers era so cospilicatat
only a company ex large as IBM can put together
th* technical teams necessary to mak* th— work."

Ttfc COROLLA*Y. 'Computers sr* to complicated
that there’s just no way to make It possible for
competitors to hook up their equipment to ours."

cVBtwy 7 r

: th* Dutchess County Pair this year, there
was a 'computer handwriting analysis* booth. Too
wrote your name on a card (Hollerith, natch) and
this was put through a slot. A typewriter (marked
"IBM") printed out the "analysis."

e brazen fake. Presiawbly th* typewriter was an
ordinary Hag Card Sslsctrlc, Memory Typewriter or
th* like. Th* flathoua* operator could aimply
choose what he wanted the printout to say by th*
Insertion of a card (on tha former) or th* twist
of a dial (on th* latter).

Incidentally, while 1W la probably th* prin¬
cipal employer of Dutchess County, we should not
as sums direct complicity.

ihib»m<;

Soma useful words fi
problem. (Th
in which acme
©1973. 1976

*W 0ff«df Of-mefUMe"

30, 1975) carried a 3b-page section called an
"executive briefing," whatever that is, on th*
office of the Future, whatever that is.

Th# article was actually two thing* spliced
together; "futuristic" gab around t>m title, and
* report on th* so-called "word processing in¬
dustry." Word processing, a silly IBM tarn,
naans handling text by tricky office equipment
(see "Type Rlghtsr," p. 14).

IBM controls th* word processing market,
discussing th* IBM wlth *“ ch machines s* the Mag Card Selectrlc and

:« Decision* magazine. th * abominable (in my opinion) MT/ST. As re¬
vere first published. ported by Buaineae Meek , IBM's basic strategy

■ Ms Ison.) Is to tsll businessmen that they have to have a

centralised typing pool of specially trained
typist* to us* these things, so th* office has
to b* reorganized. The secretaries hats th* new
organization because it makes tha* into keypunch
operators— th* paon/ssscutlv* dichotomy is a
traditional aspect of IBM products, It would

' but th* whole thing is put over as Modern.
Mow taros hae coma up with a co—latltiv.
machine, the B00 (aa* Diablo, p. y), and Businas.
Majk Intones that only the., two firms have tha
savvy and capital to auccaad In competing bo
craata tha office of tha Future. Wall, this la

•clime tic

puxzlingly ibmiah.

Umbrogllo

im software.

Umclogi—

cl—ay or inappropriate term, asp. one
Idlieh misspeaks Itself, ,uch as "random
access" for cyclical access, "direct
“ * " for indirectly accsssibls

lrtual system* for rstl
ng virtual huge matory

denies, a
•yet— in
leclmel
trying to put a

»-l0.

mslly Organised, Rbitrary Kludgi) .

ihmolatry

worship of IBM.
ibmecile

someone Umeraad i

^ y U! ‘ ty *°9.thar«<.a ° f
ItmocuS "*"** tm - if *W

iCpertIC* 0< Dy tha 4

Th* big alstaka IBM a competitors always
***m to make 1* to let IBM define th* problem,
end then go in to try to compete on th* battle¬
ground, and in th* tarsia, that IBM has laid out.
But it Is not sensible to play follow th# leader
on slippery logs through a booby trapped sweep.
Mow Xerox hae stspped onto tha Ilippery log.

But th* right thing would be to unmask th* ab¬
surdities of tha IBM game with new initiative*
«nich thmy cannot possibly

Th. office of th. futura. In th. opinion
, **“ Aubhor, will have nothing to do with th*
typing. It will

have screens, end k.ytoarde, end possibly *
printer for outgoing latter., but po.albly not.
All your business information will be callabl.
to tha Kite, instantly. An all-embracing data
structure will hold every form of information
-- ruses rice] and textual-- in a cats’-cradle of
linkages: and you, th* near, whatever your job
1 ^*‘ qulckl J7 * rov * screen through th*

entire lnform.Lion-ep.ee you are entitled to
, T ° U v111 to do no programing, and

lndsed progrsme" will never be explicitly in-
* u ' they Will e Imply take affect aa
* display apace, something
A display-driven informa-

*hich n««ds upd*t_*.

>°>z\

TKC Sfor z

tmputer

going to challenge IBM head-to-head for d
of tha whole broad field of Information, whatever
that ia. Xerox mad* copiers, but saw tha hand¬
writing on th* drimi eventually the handling of
vTlttan materiel* would cross over into th* ctx^ni-

futuze directions that have baan proposed, see
Engelbert, pp. DM46-7, PLATO, pp. 0M36-7, end

Xanadu to _ pp. c*€6 6-7.)

Tha laat July lasua of Computsrvorld in ’76,
however, tolled of Xerox’s abandonment of the com¬
puter field. Bpeclfically, Xerox will stop making
erssputars thamaalves, though they still will make
accessories such *a til* hot Diablo printer (see p.
Y). TTw news was presented In the framework of
grand tragedy, the Promethean collapse of overex¬
tended ambitions. Evidently Xerox management
pushed too hard in two incompatible directions—
building slowly for tha eventual challenge of IBM,
ve. showing profits quickly. The firm fell be¬
tween th* boat and th* dock, joining XCA and Gan-

found they couldn't mak* it sailing computars.

But Xerox is not aa far out of th* fiald as
soma eight think.

In a secret mountain hideaway-- wall, not too
secret— Xerox still has perhaps th* sharpest
bunch of coaqmtar rascal* in th* world. And they
are planning way way ahead, to the time compute™
•re practically fraa. If Xarox gives them thalr
head, and doesn't cut back, th* corporation will
have little trouble in trlimtphantly returning to
th* fiald five or tan yaare from now, conceivably
knocking IBM off its fast in the new markets of
that day with a karate-tike sweep.

Thla Fiscs of Power Is called Xerox Falo Alto
Research Center, or Xerox PARC, end its atmosphere
Of California Hallow can mislead th* unwary.

I apok* there a few years ago and found it
an astonishing exparlance. First, there was a
busy volleyball gam* outside whan I arrived, and
whan I asked for tha person I wa* going to see,
the rsceptionperson said to pull up a beanbag and
wait till he had flniahed playing volleyball.

furnished only with a mountain of thosa beanbag
sacks. As paopl* cams in, they would pull besnbags
off the mountain and ait down on them.

so far so good: California Mellow. So 1 went
into my rap, and everybody sat listening. I had no
Idas If I was getting through. Since what I try to
tell paopl* begins where technology stops— moral
precepts, a* It were, for organizing idee, end eys-
tmi in the world of the future (ess this whole DM
side)— I'm used to people looking confusad, or
worried, or angry, or even walking out. There vex
none of that. Has I getting through? Or wets they
all jutt atoned?

I think I just sort of stopped and said, "Is
everybody following this?"

There were smiles and I think somaone said,
-Me'r# with you. Tad."

And they ware. It was th* only plac* I'v*
svar spoken where tha audience was on th* same
wavelength, going straight on Into Syataw Daalgn
for Putura Man. Vary moving.

This ia obviously the place to tall you about
Alan May snd tha Dynabook.

Tha hottest project at Xerox FARC is Alan
key's Dynabook, formerly th* Kiddy Computer. As
lots of people will tall you, it's going to cost
five hundred dollars, b* nail enough to carry
•round on a shoulder strap, have a built-in screen,
run on batteries, and have all tha books a kid
wants to read from the screen stored on a cassstts.

And tha demos) They'll knock you out. Qn a
color TV screen, they'll show you a wildly changing
pageant of toy soldiers, photographs, beautiful
patterns, all generated by th* computer in real
time (aa* "Bit Maps," p. Z). And if you'r* into
computars, thay‘11 show you how all this is run by
th# beautiful SMALLTALK language (It was previously

s lot's

• all o

•calved registration f

"me hwv fevn."

"iec.iS 6 frm(&L'pe w

IS a complaint you hear evarywhara. Th* ritm-
blanca 1 . certainly not in mal.amanahlp— ha ha—
but In tha way that the standard answer to quea-
tlons has now baccm*. ‘1 don't know, thst'a not
ay department. * Faopi. feel this with • certain
bittern*., because *> .any of DRC'a far., loved it
for not being ilk* IBM. it's ilka when Jackie
Kennedy married rjnaasls...

Despite its steadfastly insipid marketing,
oonaolidatad its position at the canter
of th* «ell-c<mqx)t*r semistrcm, snd the PDP-11
consolidated *• the emal 1 and madlim-
slcad computer of choice among sophleticatea.
(The PDP-11 Is also attracting con aider able in¬
terest • • e network computer. In on# curious
Instance, First Rational city Bank of Mew York
is creating a network of 11/45*.)

NEWS tm THE 11

tar to rang* In alia, genuinely, from th* tiny
to th* grand. During tha last six moot he, DBC
has brought out the smellaet of tha Una, tha
LSI-11, all on a board the alta of a sheet of
typewriter paper, for BIX HIHORED AMD FIFTY
DOLLARS That includes tha full computer and
4K of volatile fast memory, aa wall aa built-in

Thar* have been a lot of cons In
field, but this Is not one of than. It'a marvel¬
ously real.

f laid?

Answer; they're not exactly leaving; they’re
taking a break until they can sail this beauty
for fiva hundred dollars.

Wist** tha delay?

Th* Dynabook, or Kiddy Computer, Is actually
a POP-10.

You're supposed to laugh. A PDF-10 Is a big
cosvutar, tha bast. (Sas peg* 41.) A PDP-10 sys-
tam costs hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But tha laat laugh will ba Xerox’a. Th* way
computer prices ax* coming down, through inte¬
grated circuits avar more powerful and cheap, that
PDF-10 can h* sold for 3500 in... (check your
choice) _1976 _1979 _I960 _1981 _1983.

(Interesting anecdote: tha guys at xarox PARC
asked to buy a PDP-10, but management bridled,
seeing as how xerox was in tha cosiputar business
and mad* competitive machines. So th* fellas,
nothing daunted, built thalr own . They modestly
say th* parte only cost a few thousand.)

(Nota: the above predictions era based, of
course, on tha aasimptlon of Xarox management
knowing What it’a doing. Assumptions of this type
in tha computer fiald all too often turn out to b*
without basis. But wa can hop*.)

Th* TRAC®Language Is now running time-shared,
for general customars, on Ccmputility (as men¬
tioned on p. 21), and In • fancier Version offered
by Interactive Sciences Corp., 60 Brooks Drive,
Braintree, Haas., 617/646-2600. Hooers has li¬
censed the latter firm to run both his basic pro¬
cessor snd "Advanced Developments" (rather **cr*t)
in fils system* and computer control. Apparently
he has soma spectacular data-baa a stuff In thars,
but you won’t b* able to find out about It directly.
Special packages are tha specialty of Interactive
Sciences, and with TRAC they can offer packages
with both tha data baa* stuff snd other unusual
capabilities. For instance, this time-sharing
TRAC can itself call up other computers and sign

user.

Tha Ccmputility version aaama to run for
312 an hour, tha Interactive Sciences version

In selling whole packages, not usar-dlddling.

Is not quits th* full story. This LBi-11 1*
without power supply and without tlnibua. In¬
deed, U seeis that the LSI-11 happen to b*
th* vary earn* thing a a tha 11/04, demurely an¬
nounced last fall, which costs (2500 with power
supply snd Unlbus, no front penal. Th* an¬
nouncement of tha LSI-11 than takas on th* ap¬
pearance of a reply to tha grand HITS announce¬
ment of January (aa* p. »). Especially whan it
turn* out that If you want one LSI-11, it costs

• thousand. ("Buying clubs" an being formed
with th# ids* of pawling resources for tha
quantity pries: ata "Cheap Computer#,* p. Y.)

(Sophisticate* interested In putting th*
LBI-11 in other equipment hsv* bean quick to
notice an unusual feature■ it hae an empty socket
In which you may insert tha RDM that gives you
floating point (• vary cheap option). For those
of us who daydream shout unusual functions, such

• • Hat procsssing or graphics or tha llks, this
Opening la vary suggestive: with access to tha
microprogram instructions, a different BOM could
b* put In for feat Implementation of whatever It
was you wanted-- snd your program would use for
your nefarious purpoaai ths binary commands or¬
dinarily reserved for floating point.)

(While ha may not ba able to deal with that ,
a vary savvy source parson for ths LSI-11 Is
Daniel L, Lewis at DEC In Rolling Kaedovs. Ill.)

At th* high *nd of th* lin«, a bl* PDP-11—
tha modal 70— has baan unveiled, revealing a
full 32-bit machine, in th* hundred-thouaand-
doliar class, with cache memory and time-sharing.
(But what of th* even bigger PDP-11 modal 85,
rimorad to b* whirring its thirty -six bits un¬
seen in the Marlboro plant under yet another
operating syatmi? Hill it mean that all th*
other 11a have had two more bits all this
time? Ah, pity that nothing can be said about

Multiple operating systems are. Indeed, th*
ban* of th* PDP-11 lln*. Mot only Sr* thars
DEC’S own, llks R5TS. FT-11, DOS snd R5X. which
suffer from a lack of fils compatibility and
scmetlma* won't even run th* asm* object coda;
but now thera has arisen a tar grander operating
system, (JRIX.

UNIX— th* nam*'s sug9«*tlvsn*ss of ha ram
guards la deceptive— is really the eon of MUL-
TICS (see p. 45). But it was flniahed in much
less time. Like Multics, it’s • beauty. Like
Multics, it was programmed in • higher language:
the language it's programed In, howavar, is
called simply "C". Ths language was created
by Brian Karnlghan. author of a widaly-pralsad
book which ha audaciously exmpilsd out of In¬
correct progreaming example! from other people’s
books on programing. Unix itsslf was program¬
med in "C" by Kan Thompson and Dennis Ritchie.

Unix Is a dmaon. Aside from all tha usual
feature*. It allow* programs th* magic proparty
of splitting . Each program can throw off copies

of itself, •.

salves initiate further
apprentice structure comes mainly from a Nor¬
wegian language called SIMULA, and also appears
in Alan Kay’s SMALLTALK language at Xarox PARC:
regrettably, there Is no room to discuss these
hare. (Por Simula. ••• 01e-Johan Dahl end C.A.R.
Hoars, "Hierarchical Program Structures," In
Dahl, Dijkstra and Hoar*, Structured Prograxmlng .
Academic Press.) Thaaa feature# affactively
Chang# th* character of programing completely.
For instance, to simulate a number of objects
interacting, tha program c«n spli\ off a copy of
Itself for every object, and each copy (mimicking
tha real-world object), can than respond to its
continually-changing environment as required.

In other words, this type of language means that
programs behave much mere like tha things being
simulated than they ever did before.

SIMULA coats 320,000, and, as it happens,
UNIX costa $20,000 (fraa to non-profit organisa¬
tions). Unfortunately this raises certain grave
questions, sines tha telephone company (of idiich
Ball Labs is a branch) la not supposed to ba in
tha computer programming business: and thosa who
are in the business ar* dismayed by the idea of

DEC'S OTHER COMPUTERS

Rather than throw its corporate weight en¬
tirely behind th* PDP-11, DEC hat carved out
certain areas In which it la trying to market
Its 12-blt and 16-bit machines, tha PDP-B and
POP-15. Tha PDP-8 is being pushed for business
applications, with DEC’S COBOL-llks language:
also a vary nice version of ths S has appeared,
an excellent home computer, with 6K of cars, ti»
floppy disks, kayscopa, and wwt-printar option)
this is th* "Classic," st 312,000.

Tha 18-bit POP-15 Una la still being mar¬
keted. Parhape In order to save it, it la being
marketed as a "madiia-strad" machine, with KNCPS
(DEC'S date-bass systim), with virtual huge mem¬
ory , and with hot displays.

COMPETITIVE LOOKALZRZS

Imitation of DEC computers is continuing.

On* firm, Intersil, has put tha PDP-8 on
a chip for ks< 3300. (However, ee It usually
turns out, by ths time you gat all th* parts to¬
gether It costs 33000 after all. But In quan¬
tity it's another story, and tha individual price
will drop soon enough.)

Intersil has also Intimated that they era
working on a chip to simulate th* PDP-11. If
so. this will of course bring thm smack up a-
gainst th# patent that isams to have knocked out
tha Ol^ltsl Computer Controls lookallka,

11 lookalike, mention

tlKMiCfllfr fan pjf

THE HWHStohyM-)

But M1TB took It seriously, sod offered
with the Altelr a email but complete lias of
terminals, disks, printers. Interface#, and,
moat Important, ears tea facilities.

The firm had Inn or. ted before, notably sfcae
they brought out the first hand-held calculator
several years before. Just aa they correctly
anticipated that demand, they foresaw this ana.

They also chase unerringly the right mar-’
kat to begin on: electronic hobbyists and klt-
bullder*. Th# kit-aeker enjoys tha challenge
of building a machine from only a diagram and
a box of part*; and to be far from a repairman
hold* no terror* for hla. for he le the repelr-

The price drop was not an dramatic a* it
might sen to tha general public; nor is the
computer quit!
glance. Conti . . _ r ,

ted by IBM and a muddled
that computers srs huge and cost Billions of
dollar!, very good compute™ have been availa¬
ble lately for a couple of thousand, not coun¬
ting accessories.

But th* accessor las present a probltm.

On that score, the apparent rock-bottom price
of tha Altalr may have been misleading, espe¬
cially to klt-bulldere. A computer Itself la

• limp dlshrag without memory, terminals and
programs-- all of which pad ths cost of tha
package, ly tha time you’ve added IX memory.

• terminal and BASIC software to your klt-
bullt Altalr, a thousand dollars has flown
(31400 If you buy It already aassmblad). Than
if you want tha disk (and who doesn't), that’s
st least fifteen hundred Hr*.

Now klt-bulldere just starting may not
sea th* point of all than* fripperies; they
•ren’t used to powers like that of • full com¬
puter, SO coming to real Its the lamenslty of
It all nay be • gradual awakening, with many
happy soldering experiences on the way. Others
may be brought up short as they sens* what
they're getting Into.

This Is pertly • problem of HITS’ trying
to reach two consumer groups sc ones: th* kit-
bulldar, who may hav* thought a computer was •
(sney switchbox, snd now must enter 1 world he
doesn’t know, and the computer sophisticate,
who looks at ths bottom line for ths cost of

• complete package.

Indeed, HITS' low pries* aren't that low.
When U comes to price, they srs about 50* ahead
of the conventional competition. For Instance,
their 35000 setup (with terminal and dlek)
might b* taken as roughly squlvalent to tha DEC
Classic st around 310,000 (see p. Y).

But vhat you usually pay for In this field
■ service and fringe benefits. The fundamen¬

tal t

(Thsy a

e back to the c

roblea

rreapondence about thalr
troubles.) HITS' principal
contribution is raally In the thought they have
given to Chair market, snd the depth with which
they are serving it. They no doubt anticipated
competitor* who would supply accessories snd
undersell them (see p. T). But they see the
advantage in this: they svsn give out their
■ailing list to compadtor* who sail Altalr
■«*ory boards cheaper: They were not out Just
for • quick buck; they appear lo ba thoroughly
coHalttsd to full-spectrum computer service.

In eight months. HITS has gone from
tweney-fiva to a hundred employee* and sold
OVER F0UI THOUSAND C0KFUTE»S, which 1* some¬
thing tike two or three percent of the computers
In America. Today, the electronic nute: to¬
morrow. the world.

Bob Albrecht, caliph of counterculture c<»-
puterdom. highly endorses Altalr Extended BASIC.
Says It's terrific.

Th* main service center for Altalr* ham
baan th* Albuquerque factory, but tha fleet of
their regional service canters has now opened
In Nashville.

sf- H -1

HITS prices ars quit* reasonable. If you buy a
kit for anything in tha Altalr line. It's gen¬
erally about 256 lass than tha asaemblad and
fu) ly—checked—out version.

Tha basic computer kit costs 3439 (3621
aassmblad), but ignore that: It's llks a car
without an angina, easts or wheel. A ctaplata
package (thalr "Basic 1* sat) , with th* ecsqn-
tar. 8K of memory, terminal and «K BASIC lan¬
guage la 31391. A more high-powered system
with 12X of faa
is 36650, complete

There ar* many asperate item*, plans a

tloner it Is possible, of course, to b
packaged system from them for a* such ,

"‘AUWfcrsty ouuer

Naturally 1

n be in Los Angelas.

Is at 11656 Pico (at Barrington), Hast
L.A., h mils vast of ths San Dlsgo
Freeway, 213/478-3169. Hours era 2 to
8 Wednesday to Friday, 10 to 6 on Sat¬
urday and Sunday. It'a called tha Ar¬
rowhead Computer Company, and thmy
stock s 11ns of Altalr*.

SUKMCJ «( 6 <T.*

He Has only irai..c tor the BASIC-orisntad business
•yatama offered by URGic-rouB corp., to ba found

Aa you nay know, you can't In genaral juat
rant a computer (except from IBM) , but must commit
for ita full purchase pries, sine* th* falling
prices of cosgwtars mean it will probably hav# no
smrkac value In a few yeses. (IBM's great power
Stamm in large part from being tha only compute:
company big enough to rant.)

Hell, good old Digital Equlpmant Corporation
ha* finally gotten Into the leasing busineesi
They have started a ccaiputar leasing company. Digi¬
tal Leasing, In collaboration with U.S, Learning.
They will 1 sees Dec equipment to individuals of
good credit on tarma up to seven years. Currant

couldn't crash tha system.

(Tha Basic-Four setup uses • mini frsm Micro-
data Corporation. Hlcrodsta Itaalf sails a time¬
sharing business-type setup called REALITY, which
is highly praised by John X. Levine, another young

Vary much in th* BASIC game i# Nang Labs:
thmy offer • system with 4K, a BASIC Interpreter
(In firmware), display and cassette for under $6000.
Hang has cleverly farmed the local prog teaming

• network of software houses, each
s for thalr programs.

ickwily funny description of DEC ‘• hew
factoryp fairly iccuratt, b* found in * n*«t»y
bslletr latic book called Travels in Computer land
by Ban Ross Schneider, Jr. (Addiscn-Nsslsy. pap*:

d Jerry Fischer.

AC repair station.

&r\r(MR£

nits- »•* <****>*■<

sterol* MOO, snd *•

,300- But their Min

altair. * U«*

tntil BOW, and
already Into that machine will
way lat down, thay aay.

A ccaquiter hit based on tha Motorola 6000,
With 21* byta. Of cor*. ca.a.tt. recorder and
TV display < JZ ohara. by 16 lineal ia offered
for $1745 by ™I SPHERE, 9* Beat SOO south.
Bountiful, Utah 84010.

TWO computer kite, one built around tha PACE
and another a nova loofcallke, have aaan announced
bv Bill Codbout Electronics, Box 2355 Oakland

OMland CA 94614. Me also plana an 11

jookalika.

Or you eight gat an LSI-11. An LSI-11
buying pool la being foraied by Hal Laahlay,
Southern Cal Coagwter Society, P.O. Box 987,
raaadana CA 91030.

i 1

HITS haa a ’vary low-coat terminal’ (tha
VLCT, yuk yuA) for 1170 (4129 for kit).

processor Technology, 246 5 4th St., Berkeley
94710, make* a teat diaplay kit for tha Altair
for 5160 (you supply the TV monitor end evidently
the keyboard). 64 character per line, 16 linea.

A similar kit at a almilar price is made by
Southwest Technical Products.

Bootstrap Enterprises, Ann Arbor, are also
working on a similar unit, called ‘The Dumb Ter¬
minal," with a color option.

HITS ia coamitted now to building a video
terminal, the CT-6096, that will provide both
text and graphics. Following epeea are not final.

r»t« « T» 8t kS®«r /(coo.

It will have a keyboard and video monitor,
plug straight into tha Altair, end refresh from
Altair memory module*— which may double a* reg¬
ular imory , if you don't mind garbage on tha

It will have 24 lines of upper-case charac¬
ters, SxS dots to the character, 80 characters
to tha line on a built-in monitor. In addition
it will offar graphic! from bit maps (see p. z>,
aither 120x120 or 240x240. (Tha resolution will
be evi tch-selectable, if you hava enough buffer
memory; a screen of text takes 2K, so doea a
120x120 picture, and 240x240 takes a whole 4K.)
Buffer moery will aleo be dividable into sepa¬
rate "pages* of taxt or graphics; and two pagas
will be superimposable. interlacing alternate
video field* (see pp. DM6-7). Hot* that refraah-
aent ia from random-access, rather than serial,
memory, ao that multiple field* cannot be overlaid-

ette*

While none ha* beer, announced aa yet, a music
aynthaaizer that plugs into the Altair will almost
certainly be available in 1976.

(Note that this could provide an entirely new
form of interactive terminal if used With the
Wachaprea* equipment; see nearby.)

A Salectric interface to the Altair la in the
work* at HITS.

Altair interfaces to tha PDP-0, PDP-11 and
Hov* have not yat appeared. Why not?

dec’s own floppy disk, for the B and 11,
finally came out. Price for 11i 53000 for on*
drive. 54000 for double.

L Die tape, idiich is virtually the same as
DECtap* but unpatented, has just come out at
52000 for one drive, including controller and
interface to li or Hova (interrupt-driven>.

Hot* that tha unit is compact and rugged, and may
be more suitable than disk or cassette for those
of us concerned about portable rigs and van-
mounting. Computer Operations, Inc., 10774
Tucker St., Beltsville MD 20705. (The bad news:
software costa $300 for the driver, plus 5750
to DEC if you want operating ayatmt FT-11.)

Cambridge Memories, Inc., cleverly sells
main memory banka for the 11 which can attach to
to two PDP-lla at once— thus connecting the
two machine* without using DEC’a expensive
Unibui coupltr.

Also for list Formation, Inc., sells a
curious prcgramar'i consols that traps and dis¬
play* the last sixteen Unibus addresses refer¬
enced; and Pabri-T*k offer* a cache memory for
the PDP-11/45.

■ ^

3B0C. * laser printer, the

38JO, which print# at 13,360 line* per ainu
of printing machine., it’.

‘ ' ^sslcslly *n electrostatic drum copi.
original Xerox 914, on which the patent
o«. (Even Toahibefax now «. k „

*«yw*y. this spectacular beset write*

* acenning laser on the electro.tatic dn»
IBM ha* cleverly found the way around the c

a wiil^* ° f th * dr * ,Urf * c,: instead of
polished metal eurface, if# a renewable

r*o!!irJ! h i Ch 11 U “ lf ch "*9*d automatical!
required for new la<;,..

Moreover, you can have up to IB type t
OH A l8 * 24 d ° t “trices. (THESE APE

« w, ° 011 70 rou * “ cun

A fi*^^' 1 *** u *sr-d*. ignsbl

the drt.. ‘ Pr ° 3 * Ct ° r *"* * H,t to*

7 ^ n«vst oric« ia si

££ Also it **,.

i ^ Q.

|£::

tUjlLV ^W|OUC- HCkJy

On* of the buy* of coaputer hletory ia wait¬
ing up at American Used Computer, in Boston,
617/261-1100.

Memo rax, for km unfathomable reason, built
in the early 70a a computer intended to be upwsrd-
oo^>*tibia from the 360/20. But It VII not a 360.

Why did they do thle? The kind of people who
• hop around would not buy 360/20*, and the kind of
people wfws buy 360/20# would ecarcely leave IBM’e
skirts at Upgrade time.

Thu* the Hemorax 40 has, quite understandably,
bean discontinued. And ell the one* they had left
•re waiting for you brand new up at American Uaed
Computer for y>* haart-atopping price of

£ 5500 .

That price includes 48k byte* of core.

Now for the bed news.

It come* bere-bonaa, with no software, and no
hardware support. Vou get the wiring diagram with
it, and a list of other owners, end you're on your
own. AUC does have spare parts, however. And
peripherals, mostly more expensive.

Mr. Monoeon of AUC told me on the phone that
it had 158 instruction*, including 64-bit floating
point, 32-bit binary. On studying tha literature,
however, it appears to me that tha instruction-sat
h* described ia microprograimied, with the micro¬
code intended to be reed in at startup time.

(There are 65 microinstructions.) Maybe you can
gat tha microcode for those 158 instructions and
maybe you can't. Maybe you don't care, if you're
well enough fixed to handle one of these.

It come* in basic black, 2x5x4 feat, fits In
a van, and supposedly dose not need eirconditlon-
ing. Supposedly plug-compatible with 370 peri¬
pherals: It’s really a sixtean-blt machine, and
it has sight seta of eight registers, having been
designed to perform up to eight functions simul¬
taneously.

So. 64 asin registers, 4K dynamic microstore,
48K of memory, for about the price of a used PDP-
11/10 with 4 k. smelling salts, anyone?

"Diabolo" was a game of the twenties that in¬
volved poking a spinning object. Oddly, that's
what today's Diablo involves.

Redoubtable Hex Palevsky, who brought you
Scientific Data Syatwis (which Xerox bought and
recently shut down), Rolling Stone and the movie
“Kerjoe"— has another winner, which he'e also
sold to xerox.

This is the Diablo company, which first
mads disks and now makes a sensational printing
machine. It has a whirling plastic "daisy
wheel* of type, interchangeable, and can type
30 characters per second in either direction, as
as well as draw pictures— of a sort.

The basic difference between these prin¬
ter* and conventional typewriters, like the Sel-
ectric, is their use of servos rathsr than rat¬
chets. This means thair characters can be posi¬
tioned in many intermediate positions, unlike
the fixed positions available on an ordinary
typewriter. For instance, the Diablo can posi¬
tion the type to 1/60 of an inch horizontally
and 1/48 of an inch vertically. (Nice for justi¬
fied typesetting.)

There are new a number of machines of this
kind. First came the Diablo printer, officially
the HyType 1; then the engineers who built that
went off and created a ccmpetitiva printer called
the QUME (pron. 1 kyoom'); now there'* an Improved
Diablo HyType II; Interdata makes a competitive
unit, the Carousel printer, with a little print
cup; and to sake things totally confused, there's
a special model Diablo called the 800, which
can't be connected to computers but is sold for
office use as a "word processor."

A number of companies make terminals in the
55000 ball-park embracing one or the other of
these printers. Gen-Coin Systems makes one around
the Dieblo; Anderson-Jacobson makes one around
the CUKE. Xerox makes its own computer terminal,
the 3010, around the Diablo I— which, it should
be noted, can be rented for as little aa three
months, at 5190/oonth.

Tha one everybody wants for their computers
is called the Xerox BOO, but so far that is not
available as a computer terminal. It goes faster
than the other Diablo* and offers typefaces that
look beautiful for typesetting; muefv nicer, it

seems, than the types currently available for the

other Diablos.

For those interested in just hooking up the
printer mechanism, for substantially less money
than a whole terminal, interfaces for hooking
the Diablo or QUME printers to PDP-8 or PDP-11
are available from Data Systems Design, Inc.,

1122 University Avenue, Berkeley CA 94702.

SUGGESTIONS TO XEROX CONCERNING DIABLO PRINTERS.

No charge.

1. Sell the 800 at a terminal, for goodness sake.

2. Failing that, make those pretty typefaces

available for the others.

3. Already you offer black and red ribbons; a

blue and yellow ribbon would permit printing
PICTURES IN FULL COLOR, a development of _
great interest to the many computer graphics
freaks.

4. However, that uould require someuha t finer

positioning of the platen; say, 1/120 in both
directions.

6. ... failing which, you could put out a "graphic
daisy uheel” with intermediate dot positions
equivalent to dot positions between those
nou available.

6. Could the Diablo somehow be made to sound less

like a dentist's drill?

7. Hou about a portable?

iPGOMtlCY

Dsn Hillis and Radis Perlman of tha LOGO
group at MIT, era working on a epecial "preliter-
ate* terminal to allow non-reader* (possibly in¬
cluding chimps and gorillas) to program in LOGO,
especially on tha General Turtle 2500 (Bee "Min¬
sky-* Computer,“ nearby). Plastic credit card*
will hava symbols Tor the various picture and
mualc-box functions. To write a program, or
create e movie on the scope, the user will inaert
function cards in slots. Color coding will be
used for program tranafan a red card maans "jump
to the rad subroutine." Since this ia MIT, tha
full recursive power of the system will of course
be available. (My hope is that chbapanzaea and
°ther little mlotnika can be taught recursive
program definition. Then will the public wake up
to computer* being easy?)

M'NSCC frMP 01 £*

»Wo a/fcrpoHift/. Irheucer

MARVIN CWoTer^,

The great Harvin A (insky is renowned on five
continents. Dean of the amorphous field of “ar¬
tificial intelligence,“ and referred to without
ambiguity as “Marvin" throughout oosqntterland,
he is a theoretician's theoretician.

But at the heart of every theoretician, I
think, burne the dr eon that he will someday prove
the outright, worldly importance of hie thoughts.
Like Destry, at last he will go to hie suitcase
and get out hie guns, and the audience will cheer.

The great Harvin Minsky has oome out
hlaeting.

General Turtle, Incorporated, is a toy
company that the team of Minsky and Papert put
together to market their educational computer
accessories. (See p. 57.)

They’ve sold a few, but tha impact has been
modest. And, aa a m em b er of the project puts it,
"We wented to get our ideal for education out to
the world.”

So they decided to build a terminal. But
it grew, as terminal designs will. It is now
tha GTI 2500.

Remember the tortoise and the her*? Thi*
ia the hairiest tortoise on four Wheel*. Plrst
deliveries this fall.

And here's what you get for your five thou¬
sand dollar*--

thc ruten —

a 16-bit computer like none you ever saw.

8 working registers, in addition to PC.

32 scratchpad registers (70 nanosecond).

250-nanosecond 1/0.

4K of main memory, 250 nanosecond. (Expand¬
able, of course.)

IK OF MICROPROGRAM HOWRY, 40 NANOSECOND,

DYNAMICALLY ALTERABLE. (Expandable to

4K.) Likewise 16 bits.

Nov

Cassette mtaory, 1 drive.

Alphabetical display, standard video, with
8x16-dot character generator, 64 char¬
acters, DYNAMICALLY ALTERABLE. Also
expandable.

Vectoring graphic display with 2D rotation
("turtle geometry"— lines are speci¬
fied not by endpointe but by angles and
length). 512x512 resolution, 1 million
•ndpolnts/sec refresh.

Keyboard.

I asked Dan Hillis, e member of the group, about
tha possibility of installing the 2500 in a van.
“Think of it aa a recreational vehicle with the
van optional," he said.

iN^eow;

What makes possible the computer counter¬
culture and everything else ia, of course, the
spectacular development of electronic chip tech¬
nology, the techniques of shrinking great elec¬
tronic circuits to almost no size. Electronic
rigs that were shoebox-size ten years ago are
typically now etched on chips the size of your
thumbnail and sold for a few dollars, no matter
what they contain.

A few years ago, the chips only contained
building blocks, such aa registers— units for
holding information temporarily. But now in
the mid-seventies they have come to contain
whole computers, or large sections of them.

(The distinction between microprocessors and
computers is taken up on p. 44.)

The first biggies were from Intel: the 8008
end then the 8080, a chip that has become the
heart of the Altair (see p. X), as well as rival
computer*.

New computer chips keep coning out; people
keep telling me to mention specific onee, but I
can't keep track of them. The Motorola 6800
seems popular; it will soon be the heart of new
computer* from HITS and SPHERE (see p.W and Y).

(An augmented and faster copy of the 6800 is re¬
putedly being sold by MOS Technology for $20.)
Another interesting computer chip is the PACE
microprocessor from National Semiconductor, with
four working registers and a ten-word stacki

with 16K memory it costs $500. (The PACE is
hidden in an automatic drink mixer and booze
inventory controller from Electro Unite Corp.,

San Joes, Calif. Adjusts prices to hours and
can even water the drinks precisely. Claimed
to make absentee ownership of bar* practical.)

Because of Chips, the price of computer main
memory is collapsing apace. Something like a
dollar a word in the sixties, it is something like
like a dime a word now. But Intel now offers s
storage chip holding 16K bits for $55, which is
34 a bit, and a friend of mine estimate* that
memory chips will cost 1/10 of a cent per word in
1976.

These coat collapses cause many to predict
the end of disk and tape. But that's preauture.
While these sappier chips hold e lot for a little,
their contents disappear whan the light* go out.
Until laser-punched tape comes along, disk and
magnetic tape will be very much with us n long¬
term and neckup storage devices.

Because of the acticn in chip technology,
a potential important movement in computer design
may hava bean passed over: the "macrae»dulee" de¬
veloped at Washington University in Et. Louis by
Wes Clark (father of the original DEC module*}.

The basic idea of tha macroaxxdula approach
was to have computer subsection* that were com¬
pletely interpluggable. With them you can build
any computer, to your own design, in a couple of
days. The system exists now and it works Just
fine; counters, registers, memories can ba at¬
tached quickly by cable.

Unfortunately, the coat Is high and thay
haven't found a manufacturer. With chip priees
falling, and chip know-how widespread, it's hard
to justify charging tan or ao times as much for
componsnt* just bacauaa thay can ba plugged to¬
gether faster. (Juet as unfortunately, every¬
thing in the macromodule system ie built on sec¬
tions of twelve bite .) For this reason the St.
Louis folk are having trouble getting crxnercial
sponsorship. However, perhaps Soma bright hun¬
gry chip company, reading this, would like to
get into the macromodule game. And presumably
whittle the module down to the now-univerael 8

EQUIPMENT

PAGE

M) G^fon^

The most glamorous computer, being built
today all sew to be openly celled by their devel¬
oper.- name.: the Cre.nbl.tt cwputer, Mln^y'e
computer, the Amdahl machine, the Cr.y computer.

me AMJAHL C? mpore^

The Amdahl computer or Syetem 470, a euper-
computer of the 360 eerie, by on. of the guy^who

designed thw originally— m* p. 41 _*_ riow

sv.ilebl. from Amdahl Corporation, 1250 Bait
Arqua* Avenue, Sunnyvale CA 94086. (They axe now
advertising for system, people who know tha in-
sida. of 05/NVT, VS. etc.). The first 470 i. up
•ni running st NASA's In.tltute for Space studi.e
Coliesbi* U. But IBM la said to ba readying on*
of thair famous “knockout* machines to do it in
( Datamation , July 75, 96.)

otrofiTO}

Of course you’ve thought that hardwired
setups were for eloppy analog type* of thing.

But here new we have THE CHESS MACHINE, under
•traightfaced construction at tha MIT A1 Lab,
which will provide HARDWIRED THREAT ANALYSIS.
Yes, its advanced perception architecture will
supposedly be capable of analyzing threats to
any given position Ln a GRAND PARALLEL FLASH.

Th* impact of thi# astonishing davelopaient on
the world of Electronic Chess, or anything else,
for that matter, is totally impossible to
predict.

Over a very nice lunch
at Foditys in Chicago,
Prof. Minsky and I dis¬
cussed possible styling
for his computer. Be
particularly liked the
arrangment suggested
in this sketch; a fold¬
down keyboard and the
displays sort of on poles
so they could be seen
easily through a crowd
of bystanders. The han¬
dle would only work, of
course, with the scopes
removed. We'll see later
what it finally looks

like.

W GtfEM$U(TTMA<W

Unsatisfied with the structure of normal
computer*, they are building at MIT's AI Lab e
computer whose native language la LISP. It will
have 32 bits with virtual memory, and execute
LISP like a bat out of hell.

In a refreshing reversal of trends, it will
be for one user at e time. "Time-sharing is an
idea whose time has gone," chuckles one parti¬
cipant. (Project MAC, where time-shoring grew
up, waa there.)

The cw cwotm.

Seymour Cray, master computer builder, crea¬
ted the 6600 system for Control Data. Indeed, he
had the audacity to require CDC to build the com¬
puter factory on the property adjoining his own
estate ln Chippewa Fails, Minnesota. Now that

ha’s broken off to start hi* own company (with
money from CDC, among othera), tha new computer
factory adjoins hia estate on the other side. The
Cray-1, another supercomputer, is nearing comple¬
tion there.

WJ>1 0 -TKMfctPUMtefc

Patent 13,875,932 ha* now bean issued for
How Wachspress’ electronic sex machine or what¬
ever it is (you saw it first on p. DM9). ln th*
Illustration we see it tickling • shmoo.

After you send Wachaprea* his fifty-buck
royalty, you can either buy the kit or a pre¬
built model. Concave or convex, as the poet
says. (Etchings are antediluvian and waterbedt
are cooaaonplacei as an invitation, what more in¬
cisive comeuppance could be proffered?)

Speaking of Machapraaa, it seams thee the
unusual I/O equivalent offered by the Federal
Screw Works (Troy, Mich.) la only * voice output
device.

Surprisingly, a voice input device is now
cxxnercially available from Threshold Technology,

Inc., Cinnaminmon, NJ. For $10,500 you get a
device that will recognise 32 spoken wrde, end
microphone*. (Each user has to train it on hla
32 words, but separate vocabularies may be
stored on the computer for different users or
purposes. This ia still some wey from tha
fabled "talking computer"-- saa pp. DM 13-14 for
problem* and objections— but it'* undeniably a
useful step.)

- z

The halftone lyitie of HUMRRO, rumored on
p. DN38, i» reel. Clever indeed; it divide* the
half-tone problem into two parte, on* the orig¬
inal picturing of the scene, the other it* pres¬
entation in the terminal. That mean* that their
systms permits one central image generator to
send out pictures to as many terminals as de¬
sired. Unlike the Watkins Box (see p. DH37),
whose half-million-dollar opulence can be poured
only on a single user at once, in this system
the central resource can be distributed among
various users, with each one'a picture changed
intermittently, or poured on a single user for
full animation. Currently it runs in Fortran,
transmitting encoded pictures to the unusual ter¬
minals required (built around Trinitrons). But
a special central processor is foreseen.

The systm* is called CHARGE, and Ron swallow,
it* developer, la Indeed a hard charger. (Soft¬
ware: Bill Underhill and Roger Gunwaldeen.)
Swallow's game isn't movies or engineering gra¬
phics: he want* CHARGE to compete head-to-head

with PLATO (see pp. DH26-7). And at the price*
he's talking about— $5000 per terminal and
$150,000 for the central procrv:r.or-- who knows?

Millions of psopla saw computer graphics for
the first time on the PBS "Ascent of Man" series,
where a screen drawing of Early Men's skull was
seen to rotate and gradually change In It* fea¬
ture*. This was startling even if you know about
computar graphics, since it seemed to be proceed¬
ing from complex data concerning the entire
skulls and their change*.

Not so. Actually what you saw was a aeries
of skull drawings by Peter Foldas, a Parisian
artist, with the computer generating transitional
drawings batwean then . (Indeed, though you saw
Prof. Bronowski next to the screen, you did not
see him next to the screen *t the same time the
drawing* were changing— because that had to be
filmed very slowly.)

The lyiten was created by Nestor Burtnyk and
Marcelli Wein, of the National Research Council
of Canada. It currently runs only on an SEL 840A.
(It was also used by the National Film Board of
Canada for creating Foldas' splandid film "Hun¬
ger,") They can previev by rolling through bit¬
map video on a moving-head diek. (See Burtnyk
and Wein, "Computer Generated Key-Frame Anima¬
tion," J. smpte, March 71, 149-53.)

What about the animated figure that talks to
Joe Garlagiola before baseball games? Haha.

That's a rubber puppet matted in from a black box:
the guy who does the voice worke the mouth.

Many unlikely individuate have stormed that
heartbreak town of Hollywood, leaving sadder but
wiser — but loan Sutherland, dean of computer
graphiae7 Veil, having found that the movie-
mkers are not ready for image synthesis — the
dreamemithe unprepared, as it were, for the Total
Forge — he is sojourning at the Hand Corporation.

A fella named Charles McCarthy, of suburban
Chicago, bought the "Computer Eye" from Spatial
Data Systems, and will do mail-order picture con¬
versions. He'll convert your favorite snapshot
to a printout of the same subject made of light
and dark letters. If you're interested in having
the actual grey-scale data for processing in your
own computer, inquire.

The riobius Group, Inc., P-0- Box 306, Win¬
field IL 60190.

Want a computer-controlled videocassette
recorder? The model to ask for is the Sony 2850,
coating (gasp) some six thousand bucks. An in¬
terface to the PDP-11 is made by CMX Systems,

635 Vaqueros, Ave., Sunnyvale CA 94086.

Incidentally, scaled-down CMX editing setups
are beginning to get around. For instance, they
have a small setup in the pleasant offices of DJFi
Film L Tape, 4 East 46, NYC: three of the above
Sonys and the QiX Model 50 control setup, using
a PDP-11 and keyacope. Though prices are by the
job, the basic charge is $75/hour. (Note that
the big. CMX setup, with a disk, is the model 300.)

TiK«l,WN,W«l

Since the forties, there have been continual
announcements that video disks— movies you play
on your TV off a record— were right around the
corner. Earlier this year they were supposedly
going to be available before Christman. Now they
might be on sale, "on a limited basis," in 1976.
(TV Guide, 16 Aug 75, p. 7.) Because of the grave
difficulties of engineering— inaccuracies in pun¬
ching the center hole mean the track can't help
being off center, for instance— sane of us are
skeptical.

Two systems have been confidently announced.
Philips, the firm that gave us the audio caasette,
has a system that will follow the spiral track on
the disk from underneath with a laser. The disk
turns at 30 revolutions per second, or one turn
per TV frame, so it can supposedly freeze on one
frame when desired.

The other system Is from RCA, which has
a long history of me-too announcements, but at
least two of them made it big (the 45 record and
the color TV system now used in the USA), so RCA
should not be dismissed out of hand. Their disk
system will supposedly go at 450 rpm (7.5 revol¬
utions/second) , but they still mean to track it
with a needle . The man from TV Guide says he's
seen it and it works perfectly, but I -would per¬
sonally look for hidden wires.

(MCA, an entertainment conglomerate, has
hitched up with Philips and printed a catalog of
all the movies they will supposedly make available
on disk for the "NCA-Philips" system— such as
D *»try Rifles Again for around ten bucks. Thia is
probably just a bluff: with the price of audio
records what they are, no way is a movie going to
cost ten bucks. But it makes RCA look weaker,
which is probably the purpose.)

The prospect surprised them, but MAGI (see
p. DM36) allows as how they might let you make
movies on their over-the-phone movie-making setup
(sketched on p. DM36). Price to capable out-
ders, if the software meshed, would be about $50
an hour, (six hours makes one minute of film,
not counting the phone bill. Cheap if you know
movie economics.)

Meanwhile, John Lowry, at Digital Video Lab¬
oratories in Toronto, has been developing high-
quality video suitable for transfer to theatrical
film. He and they have developed a 655-line
color system— with heavy digital enhanemnent
(see "Picture Processing," p. DM10). I scarcely
believe my notea, but 1 saw it, and wrote down
that it was comparable to 35» studio color.

The day of "electronic cameras"— that ia, film-
quality video— may be upon us soon.

About 1972, there was announced an electron¬
ically-controlled color filter that could change
to any hue in nanoseconds. That would be just
what we all need for color movies from CCMa—
but what happened to it?

feTOl^SftVtf

At the high end of things, a firm called
Three Rivers Company has come in with a 3D vec¬
toring system (competitors discussed p. DM30).
Supposedly they can pack a lot more lines on the
screen.

The price of the GT40 display (see p. DM21),
which all in all is one of the best displays on
the market, has just dropped to 56500. To dis¬
guise this pride drop, DEC gives you the smaller
tube and no keyboard.

And at the low end, a firm called Megatek
in San Diego offers line-drawing CRT controllers
for $1000 to $3000. All permit animation. You
have to supply the oscilloscope. Their equipment
plugs into the PDP-11 or the Nova, or in one
case connects in tandem to an ASCII time-sharing
terminal (!).

The 11 and Nova models work directly from
BASIC; your program in Basic puts line lists in
the device's buffer memory. The time-sharing
model converts incoming line lists from ASCII to
binary and stores them internally. 256 linea
with 8-bit resolution cost $1900, $110®and $1600
for 11, Nova and t-s respectively; 1024 lines
with 10-bit resolution cost $2800, $2000 and
$2500 respectively. (Nova and 11 models can be
completely updated in two refresh cycles, yiel¬
ding as much animation as anyone can decently
expect for the price. Software is supplied to
provide display output from Nova, PDP-11 or time¬
sharing BASIC; also t-s Fortran.)

Meanwhile, for the hands-on electronics guy,
Optical Electronics, Inc. makes all kinds of ro¬
tation modules. You can build your own 3D rota¬
tion setup out of their modules for a couple of
thousand: but, of course, the fancy digital I/O
for high-speed refreshment is not available.

An interesting capability of the OEI equipment,
though, is that you can build 4D - or even 5D-
rotatlon systems out of their modules. Hmmm.

?lAcro Kvaf

Excellent manuals on the PLATO aystan and
TUTOR language are now available from CERL, Uni¬
versity of Illinois, Urbans.

The next generation of PLATO terminals is
coming down the line. The microfiche projector
ia withering eway, as was eaaily foreseeable;
meantime, steps are being taken toward a more
high-performance terminal, by putting a computer
in it. Thie is being done both by Jack Stifle,
who has done it with the Intel chip, and Roger
Johnaon, who haa the panel interfaced to an 11.
(11 fans please note the implication: it is pos¬
sible that the interface may b* marketed.)

Meanwhile, PLATO-like terminals (the model
AC-60) are about $5000 from Applications Group,
Inc., P.0. Box 444B, Maumee, Ohio 43537. Note
that these hava standard non-PLATO interfaces
and standard keyboards, but the Owens-Illinois
plasma panal (erroneously called Corning else¬
where in the book) blazes in all its glory.

flTWWS

T1i» main development in coagxiter graphics In
the last year has been the sudden upsurge of the
bit-map approach to computer display. While the
approach, and equipment for It— like the Data
Disk system-- have been eround for seme time, the
falling pries of electronics, especially In the
memory area, have made It abruptly the cheapest
and thus tha most popular type of coaputsr dis¬
play for graphics.

A 'bit map" is a aerie* of dot positions,
or bits, recorded in seme form of feet memory
and read out in sync to a conventional scanned
video eystm (see pp. DM6-7) . The one bits
stand for dot* or little equares, the zeroea
for nothing, and the video system brightens the
corresponding zones on the screen. This method
hae certain disadvantage*-- parts of pictures
cannot be automatically dietinguiahed or sepa¬
rately animated, aa with aubroutining display
(see "The Mind’s Eye," asp. p. DM23)— but for
the money it'* great. Sizes given refer to the
number of squares in the rectangle of the picture.

BLACK-AND-WHITE

An off-the-shelf bit-map systM for the
PDP-11 or the Nova is available from intermedia
Systems, 20430 Town Center Lane, Cupertino CA
95014 ($2750 or $2500 respectively). May be
ganged for grey-scale or color. It's 256x256.

For the Altair, the forthcoming 8096 display
(see p. Y) Will have 120x120 or 240x240 bit-map
graphics, for prices starting around $1000.

COLOR

Extra bit maps, plus electronics, can get you
color; if you double the number of bits you can
double the nvnber of available colors on your dis¬
play, ad lnfinitra.

On the small side, 64x64 color wll shortly
be available for the Altair from the Digital Group,
Denver. A 128x128 color bit-map system for the 11
has just been announced by DEC (for "nuclear medi¬
cine" of all things— but they will part with it
to anybody for 8 or 10 thousand (not yet fixed)),
they stress that this will be the first of a modu¬
lar series of bit-map displays, with plugins for
different degrees of resolution and differant
character generators.

Romtek and Comtal both make 256x256 bit-map
systaas, priced in the $16,000 area.

Above this resolution special TV systems tend
to be necessary. Both Ramtek and comtal make very
expensive systems for the purpose, using
solid-state and disk respectively.

You may or may not have heard of the Advent
TV projector, the most glorious TV thing there is.
It costs $3500 and projects a four-foot picture in
the best TV color you can find. A lot of guys are
bit-mapping to it.

At MIT they've got bit-map color on the Ad¬
vent at better than 400x500 resolution. (An option
planned for the Flying Turtle (Bee p. Y> will al¬
low its core manory to be used with the Advent as
a bit-map display refresher.) At Comtal they're
going for 1000x1000 on the Advent, rejiggering the
electronics from scratch.

The most spectacular demonstration of bit-map
color so far has no doubt been the film done by
Dick Shoup et al. at Xerox PARC (see p. X), show¬
ing the super animation that's possible when big-
computer resources are given over to bit-map ani¬
mation. Their system is 600x800.

Y<VK. $«Cr Aisrw pwtij

All those scoreboards and wisecracking light-
grids, now that they are computer-controlled,
raise all kindB of possibilities for non-frame
animation. The big ones cost in the millions; a
small one for shopping centers costs a hundred
grand (Millenium Info Systems, Santa Clara CA).

Within a year or so, though, you ought to
be able to get a nice animated display-panel of
some sort for the side of your van, assisting
you've got the computer inside.

A surprise something-or-other from DEC, the
VT55, represents a breakthrough of some sort. But
what were they thinking of?

"Graphic capability" has been added to an
ordinary upper-case keyscope. Specifically, the
ability to make two graphs , i.e., two wlggly lines
(no more) somewhere between the left and right
sides of the screen. You can also shade in under
them, and add coordinate grids. It's $2500, and
obviously great if you're bonkers for 2D graphs.

QJW QH0!$ &M4C-T&

IBM, which did not taka port in its develop¬
ment, is sponsoring a $100,000 CHARGE installation
at the University of Waterloo, in Canada.

*rv « rwfiwf*

labor Day, 1975

WORK THANK$

In banging together thia
volisae originally. I omitted
thanking Hash Wlaner, brazen t
brash young old-fashioned new
editor of Computer Decisions ,
who has changed that publica¬
tion from stolid to peppery.

Thanks also to my good
friend Robert w. Fiddler, Esq.,
patent attorney and still an
ax-phllosophy professor at
heart, for many delightful and
witty conversations on problem*
of patent, copyright and the
vagaries of intellectual prop¬
erty. Any harebrained ideas on
these topics expressed here,
however, ere almost assuredly
■y own.

For much of the informa¬
tion in this supplement 1 am
grateful to Bob Albraeht of
PCC, mentioned here and there.

Finally, special thank*
to CcMsander Hugo McCauley,
better known to you as Hugo - *

Book Service, for hi* yeoman
performance in shipping out
the books— not to mention car¬
rying then up end down stairs,
typing the mailing labels,
checking for bad onas, and
sending out all thooa notes of
apology when we were out of
books again and again and again.
And to long-suffering Lois and
Megan McCauley, my especial
gratitude.

WHATEVER

The sea-to-shining-sea
Nelson Unplre now consists of
a lot of unsold books, a IK Al¬
tair and a second pair of shoes.
My scheme for taking on Appren¬
tice Generalists may have to
wait awhile. So may Computer
Lib, the film. But just wait.

Speaking of which, what
about this book, hey, now?

Eventually there will be
a new edition. Yes, the type
is horrendously small, and that
will have to be fixed. But
that involves new negatives for
every page, an expenditure of
thousands of dollars, and some
reconsideration of how this
should all be sat up.

There have been several
interesting plans. One was to
split the contents of this book
into three books, add material,
enlarge the type and have them
each this size and price. Ten¬
tative titles were Computer Lib
/ Dream Machines , Computer a
Arise (/ Computers Arouse!, and
Guerrilla Ccmputlnq/Blectronlc
Monkeyshinas . Sample cover,
for Guerrilla Computing : King
Kong climbing the front panel
of a 370 holding Patty Haarst.

(I also daydreamed about put¬
ting out a lO-volvsne encyclo¬
pedia in the same format, em¬
bracing psychology/sociology,
biology/evolutionary strategy,
history (as strategy)/more his¬
tory (as mood and feeling),
revolution versus continuity
(a two-sided position paper),.,
the Gem-Maniacal Encyclopedia 6 ™.
But reason has prevailed, and
such forays have been postponed
indefinitely.

The present plan is for
Computer Lib to be rewritten
and reset in bigger type, at
least 256 pages, with at least
8 color pages and color cover.
(We're talking about fall '76
or later.) Price will have to
be $15. If you think that'a a
ripoff you can still get this
one. (A number of people have
complained to me about the £7
price tag of this volume. Have
they ever bought other books?)
Later I would like to put out
an anthology of my favorite ar¬
ticles in the field, using the
Computers Arise (/ Computers
Arouse! title and format, and
with some good 3D if possible.

In any case, I want to stay in
the publishing game: I haven't
had so much fun in years, oth¬
er projected volumes include
The Inner Beyond , by Sheila
McKenzie: Dirty Driving and the
Strategy of Traffic by "Driver
Ed;" and The Nelson Computer
Glossary . Soon 1 hope to be
able to typeset from my own
computer, and possibly to share
this facility.

This has been a moat in¬
teresting year. I have been
pleased to meet, and otherwise
enjoy, the variety of clever,
charming and/or lubricous per¬
sons who have sought me out
since the book first appeared;
as well as all the speaking en¬
gagements, soirees and whatnot.

I am delighted to receive
relevant material and communi¬
cations of any kind, although
problems of time, disorganiza¬
tion and mood often preclude
a Personal Type Haply.

It has bean a real lift for
my morale to share some of these
ideas and enthusiasms with a
wider public at last. It is
you, finally, who hava to care:
and I am very glad you do.

As to the most important
matters, there is • news black¬
out for tha indafinite future.
Plaaaa stand by.

Next year in Xanadu.

WZI

Thle book (both .Id..) 1. b...d lo port on -r ■ • «

American Ch.r.tc.1 Society. th. Aa.rle.n Dec gsen te11 on In.
An.rlcon Managesent A.aoci.tton, th. Aa.ocl.tcd Pr«.., th
ton for Cosputing Machinery, th. C.ntr.l Intelligence A».i
ltut. of El.ctrlc.I .nd Electronic. Engineer. the Prtn
l.hIn. A.aocl.tlon, th. Rend Corporation, th. Society f
on Dl.play, th. Society of Motion Picture .nd Televietoi
Incorporated, Onion Th«olo«lc.l Sesinsry (th. Auburn 1
. Palo Alto It. ..arch C.nt.r, and varlou. art .choola, c
erattle* .nd Joint Cooput.r Conference..

Infor-
Engine*
turn.) ,

leg**>

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Everybody At Chicsgo Circle Campus
has been very sporting about this project.
I an grateful not only for the oncourage-
»ent and assistance of various individuals
(especially Joseph I. Lipson, David C.
Miller and Samuel Schrage), but for the
atmosphere of support which has made this
possible. My thanks to the Department of
Art and the Office of Instructional Re¬
sources Development for freeing me from
teaching duties, to the Computer Center
■nd the Department of Chemistry for let¬
ting me use pictures of their equipment,
and everybody for their encouragement.

I would like to thank the Walt Disney
organization for their permission to de¬
pict their wonderful characters, and ev¬
eryone else who furnished materials and
permissions for the things herein.

Thanks also to those who looked over
some of the material, especially Herbert
Grosch of Computerworld . Dan McGurk of
the Computer Indus try"Association, and
William Rodgers.

I am particularly grateful to the
many who have explained computers to me
over the years, especially Dave Denniston,
Robert Fenichel, Andrew J. Singer, John
R. Levine.

My thanks to Tom Barnard for some of
the early typing, and for the Porta-Xan.

I am grateful to Computer Decisions
magazine for their good will, and help in
researching computer image synthesis.

My roommate Tom DeFanti, mentioned
elsewhere in this book, has been consid¬
erate beyond the call of duty in giving
over all the first-floor rooms of our
house to this project for six months.

wc MMtews-ric?

Persona of sagacity hove been saying for
some time that we are materialistic.

In an Important sense this ta not so.

Th# machines, and toy., and Involvement#
w. buy into, are in but a smalt proportion of
casea owned .imply as scores, for their coat
as consumption symbols.

Rather, we buy things that REPRESENT
IDEALS, hoping ourselves to partake of some
abstraction or image-- the Playboy man, the
Smart Businessman, the CJcvcr Homemaker.

Each product tries to tell us it is the key¬
stone of a way of life, and then, at least at that
moment of purchase, we step into, wc embrace
that Way of life, covering ouraclvcs with the
feeling, the aura, the magic we saw in the com¬
mercial.

This ia not material lam. It la wishful
gTasplng at miasma. (Following sentence op¬
tional.) It is communion, with the object seized
simply the Objective Correlative of a hoped-for
transaubstantiation. (Sorry.) It's a seeking,
not to possess * to belong.

My thanks finally to the many others
whose good will has kept me going, in
particular my former wife and eternal
friend, Deborah Stone Nelson.

Special greetings to ny friend and
neighbor, Mrs. John R. Neill: I hope you
enjoy the uses which your husband's il¬
lustrations of Tik-Tok the Machine Man
have found here.

Lastly, for her contributions to
morale (and for not footprinting the
pasteups), let's have a warn hand for
Pooky the Wonder Dog.

The occasional Oz illustrations are ail by
John R. Neill, from varioua out-of-copyright Oz
books by L. Frank Baum, especially Ozma of Oz
and Tik-Tok of Oz. Tik-Tok. the Machine Man.
is the figure to whom occasional allegorical sig¬
nificance is attached here by juxtaposition.

The Oz picture in this sDread is from
The Patchwork Girl of Oz ■

Thought you might wonder.

D.W. GRIFFITH-- took the movie-box and created
the photoplay . no longer a twisted stage
production.

WALT DISNEY-- created a hypnotic pantheon of
kindly and innocent semi-animals, senti¬
mentally universal, generally acceptable.

JOHN W. CAMPBELL-- as author and then editor
of Astounding , turned American science-
fiction from the Buck Rogers space opera
to the human story . built around thought-
out premises and structures.

IVAN SUTHERLAND-- programmed and systematized
a computer setup for helping people think
and work with deeply-structured pictorial
information. (Sec p.jthtl).)

DOUG ENGELBART-- foresaw the use of computer
screens as a way of expanding the mind,
and over the last decade and a half has
brought about just that.

And more, and on.

- A // V

ANOTHER QUICKIE

Compare Alice, when she gets to Wonderland
("Deary me! Curioser and eurloser!")
with Dorothy Gale, tranaporled to Oz

(" How do l get back to Kansas ?!! t")
Fantasy ties in with everything, including
American gjt-out-n-do-il.

OUT THE DOOR IN '74
I ha'

, t * d “rite an introduction to eonputars, and a separate book on Fantica, for years.
““f 1 ” 8 th *“ back-to-back in a Whole Earth foraat, with lota of alachlevoue Enrich-
-ent material didn't hit .e till Jan 73. I have tried to add all the stimulating and exhilarating
stuff I could find, especially personalizations, as on the other aide; coaputers are deeply personal
mac inea, contrary to legend, and ao are ahowing-ayatemu. 1 regret having to throw so many of ay
but I hope that some readers will sense the seriousness below.

elief ,

The fli

thing i

—j for this book esae fr
straightforwardly how to asks Geodesic Doses. A

wonderful Whole Earth Catalog of Stewart Brand. As I think back,

’ Seegar a wonderful banjo book, and Tom HcCahill's autoic_

that of taking my case to the public because the expe:
i Mej. Alexander de Seversky's Victory Through Alt

•oa Pete
Ae to the laet
precedent I cen think'
try how he thought

i World 1

II.

s in Hechenix Illustreted .
'ta won't listen, the only
Power, telling the coun-

Thle project, staple in principl
a.ry because no publisher could have coaprehen
( * d ‘ ) * — Pu bllah -It- Youraelf Hand'

10701.

'"llit present product is not
do rut JD. (Believe It or not,
checking and bibliographies had
type size; and so on. Half the i
tlons on aovies, "au 1t 1-aed ta , " i
future, and goodness knows what.

Infinitely bother
ded the concept of t
ndbook . $4 froa The Pu

lose, Se1f-pub 11ca 1 1 on was neces-
iIs book; 1 heartily recoaaend Bill
ihcert Book Press, Box 845, Yonkers

the book I had ae an t to write. Heat la firat-draft; how the send
I do not like underlining things— a first-draft expedient.) Feel
to be largely abendoned. Batter planning could have increased
manuscript, and the glossary, had to be kicked aside; Including a<
" " rrt fila. training simulators, augmented stags productions of th<
zy for all that.

... WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS

-y -lIe 1 InS r wi« t fri«da n sh^. h ‘rv be * n CO,,pUt * d ““bout th, dedicated and axtr.ordin.ry effort, o
my deepest gr^Itude ^her ai!. a th A both Acuity a.eb.r. at ClrclS, who have

project (which I continuous^ under,.ti *?*.»"?**? u * th,ir ,00<t tiM to th * tB<liouB aepects of this
p J 1 , „ “ • ' “ ,d ' 1 hope u hBB worth their work aa « " -

who.e concern for intelligent change in education drove
has also ay deepest adairetion.

Ms. McKenzie,
this project

i boundlei

The sad thing about it all li
ayataa (of which only a couple ex
I feel deeply for everyone who hai
decent systems were available.

that 90X of th... effort, ar. unn.ee..ary. A decent coaputer text
I *“***) would have obviated all tha findlng-and-retyplog probltit,
trouble writing by conventional eeanap and who wouldn’t if only

sn 3

w seer

I already said on the other aide that the
computer is a Rorschach, and you make of it
some wild reflection of what you are yourself.
There is more to it than that.

America ia the land where the machine ia
on intimate part of our fantasy life.

Germans are too literal, they can get off
on well-oiled cogs. The French ere too vague.
(I've noticed that German science-fiction maga¬
zines had covers of machines and planets: French
science-fiction magazines, of dragons and people
with wings. Our science-fiction covers show
people with machines. Intimately, emotionally.)
German fantasy Is icy and impersonal. French
fantasy too personal, and American fantasy is
splat In the middle, uniting both: man and
machine, means and ends, emotion and details.

Men always longed to fly, but it was here
that they first did. This is the land of the
MOVIE, a fantasy fabricated with endless diffi¬
culty using various kinds of equipment.

The mad tinkerer is a fabled character
in our fiction.

This is the land of the kandy kolor hot
rod. the Hell's Angel chopper, the drive-in
movie. And the wild hot-rod. in fact, is Just
the flip side of the deep-carpetcd Cadillac: each
is a fantasy . on extension of its owner's image
of himself in the world.

Thus it was not an historical accident,
but utterly predetermined, that in the hands of
Americana the computer would become a way of
realizing every conceivable wild fantasy that
was dear to them.

This ia perfectly all right. This is as it
should be. This ia the best pert of our culture.
Not "Let a hundred flowers bloom," but "Let a
hundred gizmos clank.” This has sped immeas¬
urably the imaginative development of many dif¬
ferent things we might want. I try here fairly
lo explain a few differences among them.

There is just one problem with all this.
Now that oil these things exist, or come nearer
to existing, which ones will other people want?
What will it be possible for everyone to have?
And how con we tie all these things together?

(blfleNB

Z DREAM MACHINES

4 APPARATUSES OF APPARITION

6 VIDEO

6 LIGHTNING IN A BOTTLE:

THE CATHODE-RAY TUBE
8 HOLOGRAPHY

8 Sandin's Image Processor

9 BODY ELECTRONICS

10 PICTURE PROCESSING

11 AUDIO li COMPUTERS

12 THREE COMPUTER DREAMS:

12 AI (artificial intelligence)

IS IR (information retrieval)

15 CAI (computer-assisted
instruction)

16 "No More Teachers’

Dirty Looks."

20 THE MIND’S EYE

(computer display)

24 COMPUTER MOVIES

26 PLATO

28 "Laws of the Universe

Hyper-Comics”

30 THE MIND’S EYE MORE:

3D LINE SYSTEMS

31 DeFanti's Coup de GRASS

32 HALFTONE IMAGE SYNTHESIS
1. Polygon Systems

34 2. Shades of Reality

(nicer greys)

37 3. Hardening of the

Artistries (special hardware)

39 4. Computer Image Corp.

40 THE MIND'S EYE MORE:

n Dimensions

41 The Circle. Graphics Habitat

42 The Tissue of Thought

42 How to Learn Anything

43 On Writing

43 Tho Heritage

44 HYPERMEDIA, HYPERTEXTS

46 Engeibart

48 FANTICS

S2 T1IINKERT0YS

56 XANADU

58 WHAT NELSON IS REALLY SAYING

59 FLIP OUT

(Note: this thesis is being advanced
only half-seriously. There have been a
number Of exsctly-dreamful Frenchmen, and
for this throe-nationality split to be
really true, they would all have to have
come from Alsace, next to Germany: Jule.->
Vorne, Daguorrc, the brothers MontgoIfJu. ,
the brothers Lumiere, to name a few.)

me uGfND of wee-kAk)

In the lantaaiea of their aubjeel*. which they
fed ere the precunor* ol new artiaiic image*
ihit will in turn actualize thermelyex a» another
form of being, Marten and Hmuton aee * new
here figure constantly recurring. Thia new hero
ia not the old ‘‘hero of * thouaand face*,” the
individualist who auffera, dica, and l» reborn,
alaughtering and conquering along the way. In-
atead, he ia Protean, capable of infinite change*
in appearance and llyle, a magician, a Baltha¬
zar bringing gift*. He rupture# ralegoriei and
confutes the aenaea, and in doing ao he hold*
out the promise of fuaion on a higher level.

If auch • hero were to become the model (or
the approaching age, he would probably not be
the founder of a maaa moremenl or the god of
a new religion. He would be more rluxive, more
changeful than hia predeceaaora. He would be ■
aorcerer who Ircala the external world and the
internal wozld on equal term*, giving apirit In
the former and fleah to th* latter. He would be
a mailer of paradox and a player of gamm,
•peaking a new language. Hi* one prayer might
1i the line* of Blake:

May Goi m keep
F root liMfU action
Amt Newton "a Jaap.

— Kenneth Cavamier,

"Voyag« °f tl% * P*yokenaut*."
Harper'*. Jan 74, p. 74.

grandfather,

Uieodor Hoi m.

APfW/tS
or AfP^iTiQM

It H«mt different companies are all the
time Introducing wonderful new devices that will
revolutionize, uh. whatever It 1 b we do with. uh.
Information and stuff. Things you'll attach to
your TV to get highbrow programs or dirty movies.
Microfilm devices that will shrink the contents
of the Vatican Library to a dot on your glasses.
Goggles that show you holographic color movies.

A pince-nez that lets you see the future. And
so on.

Reading Popular Mechanics or the Saturday
review of patents in the New York Times, you
get the idea of Something Big. New and Wonder¬
ful About to Happen, so we'll all have access to
anything, anytime, anywhere.

But it’s been that way for decades, and
with certain exceptions hasn't happened yet.

Here are some things that have caught on,
and are mostly familiar to us all.

Book. Newspaper. Magazine. Radio (AM).
Phonograph record (78). Tape recorder, J".
Black-and-white television. Radio (FM). Phono¬
graph record (33). Phonograph record (45).

Color television. Tape cartridge (i"). Tape
cassette (Philips, ca. 1/8"). Stereo records
and tapes. Oh yeah, and movies: 3Smm, 16mm,
8mm, Super 8mm. Carousel projectors. View-
master stereo viewers.

Here are some things in the process of
catching on (and not assured of success):
Quadrophonic sound. Dolby. Chromium, dioxide
tape emulsion. Super 16 movie format.

But for everything that did catch on, dozens
didn't. Some examples: 12-inch 45 rpm records.
11.5 millimeter movies. RCA's Hnch tape cart¬
ridge. which became a model for the much smaller
Philips. Wire recorders.

Then there are the things that caught on
for awhile and went away. Stereopticons (and
their beautiful descendant, the Tru-Vue, which
I loved as a kid). Cylindrical recordings.

Piano rolls. And so on.

Then there are the video recording sys¬
tems. CBS' EVR died before it got anywhere.
RCA's SelectaVision isn't out jret. 2-inch quad
is standard in the studios, jhinch Porta-Pak
is standard among the Video Freaks, and it looks
like Sony's 3/4" cartridge will win as the main
sales and storage medium. (The Philips system
here looks as though it won’t make it, and 1-inch
is dubious.) But what's this we hear about
video disks (twenty-five years after they announ¬
ced Phonerision. Ah, well.)?

The thing is, so many of these things seem
to sound alike. They all mention "information
retrieval," education, technology, possibly "the
information explosion" and "the knowledge in¬
dustry." Press releases or effusive newspaper
articles may use phrases like "space-age."
"futuristic," "McLuhanesque" or even "Orwellian"
(though few people who use that word seem to
know what Orwell stood for; see p ).

And the intimidating company names!

Outfits with names like General Learning, Inc.,
or Synergistic Cybernetics, Inc., or even
Communications | Research (Machines, Inc.

Surely such people must know what they are
doing, to use such scientific-sounding phrases
as these!

Then there are the business magazines.

In the late sixties they were talking about "The
Knowledge Industry" (a fiction, it turned out,
of an economist's lumping a lot of things together
oddly). Now they talk about the Cable TV out¬
fits and the Video Cartridge outfits as though
they’re the cat’s pajamas.

Eablup

in Nm

of 2d International Animation Film Festival
iork, Jan 74. ©Malt Disney Productions.

r t/eec’f SfjOfc) Btlt'NKf OKC MOVSOSWSSS —

You Can’t Tell the Experts Without They Program You

(Cf. "Calling n .Spade a Spade, p J > )

BW15 iM TcWb

Guy_’a Background Toll-Tale Phraaes fc Jargumentatlon

Television:

1. Video freaks

2. Network People

3. Cable Operators

Moth/Engineering
Display Engineering

Programmed
Instruction,
Computer-Assisted
Instruction

Publishing

Advertising,

Public Relations,
Marketing

Artificial Intelligence

McLuhanatic

Nelsonian

"Media" (meaning television );

"Software" (meaning videotapes).

"Programming" (meaning competitive scheduling);

"Software" (meaning fixed-length TV shows).

Head end, upstream t downstream, back-channel,
"interactive TV" (meaning any form of interactive
computer system they can get in on).

information theory, channel capacity, bandwidth,
feedback, anything complex and irrelevant.

Full duplex, echoplex, aspect ratio, scroll, cursor;
"information transfer" (meaning telling or teaching);

"data delivery" (act thereof).

"Software" (meaning sequential or branching tell-t-
test materials); "Programming" (creating these);
reinforcement schedules (meaning presentational order);
"inputs" (meaning ideas and information); "feedback"
(meaning replies); "simulations" (meaning pictures or
events a user can influence).

"Software" (meaning books).

"Demographics" (meaning factions); campaign mrolegy
(meaning how you hit a market); "penetration"

(meaning extent to which your stuff catches on);
"Programming" (meaning anything whatever).

Anything mathematical; theorems, discriminators, neural
nets: "programming" (meaning setting up anything
very complicated and incomprehensible).

Global Village, mosaic, surround; "Programming"

(meaning psychological indoctrination): anybody
else’s terms, dynamically infused with new senses.

Medium (meaning stabilized presentational context);

Writing and Creation (meaning thoughtful production
of something presentable, whether sequential or not,
in a medium); "Programming" (meaning giving
exact instructions to o computer); media integrity,
inventions & conventions: hypertext, thinkertoy, fantics.

Having spent some considerable time around
and among these areas, I have developed consid¬
erable cynicism and a bad case of the giggles.
Originally it all seemed to fit together and to be
leading somewhere, but talking to people at all
levels, and either giving advice or trying to
interpret the advice of others, I am convinced
that what we have here in this whole audio¬
visual-presentational whizbang field is nothing
less than a very high order of collective insanity.
The strange way companies adopt and drop var¬
ious product lines, and verbalize what they think
they are doing, seem to me a combination of
lemmingism and a willingness to follow any Auth¬
ority in an expensive suit. I have talked to
enough vice-presidents and presidents of compu¬
ter companies, publishing companies, networks,
media outfits and so on, to be totally certain
that they have no special knowledge or unusual
basis of information; yet these people's remarks,
as amplified through the business reporters,
send the whole nation a-dithering. There are
times I think everybody in Medio is either deluded,
misguided, lying or crazy.

THREE CRUCIAL POINTS.

1. SYSTEMS "IN THE HOME."

The emphasis has changed from trying to
sell snazzy systems to the schools (which don't
have the money) to the home. This in turn
has convinced most people that the new systems
have to be very limited, like jimmied-up TV sets.
(We easily lose track of the fact that you enn
have anything "in the home" if you want to pay
for it; and an economy in which Marantzes and
snowmobiles have caught on big indicates that
some people are going to be willing to pay for
really hot stuff.)

2. CATCHING ON.

The key question is not how good a system
is in the abstract, but whether it will catch on.
(Obviously if we're public-spirited we want the
best systems to catch on, of course.)

This matter of Catching On is a fickle and
crucial business.

According to one anecdote, Mr. Bell
couldn't interest anyone in his invention, which
he was showing at some trade fair. Then who
should come by but the Emperor of Brazil (!),
who was about to leave with his retinue of ad¬
visers. "What is that?" asked the Emperor of
Brazil. "Nothing to bother with," they said, and
tried to rush him by, but he stopped and loved
it, and ordered the first pair of telephones sold.
This made the headlines, and the sale of tele¬
phones began.

Another anecdote. It is legendary that
inventors overvalue their own work. Yet after
Thomas Edison had invented the kinematograph,
or "moving picture," a device you looked into
turning a crank, he declined to build a projector
for it, saying that the novelty would wear off .
Obviously he did’t quite see what "catching~on"
would mean here.

Wonderful Systems That Were Gonna Be

WHEiec

I once reud a mind-blowing review article in
Films in Review , early sixties I think,
on schemes to make three-dimensional
movies before 1930 . There were dozens.

Then there was that multiscreen film Napoleon

-- a legend-- done in the nineteen-twenties.
(That one really existed.)

PhoneviBion . about 1947 or so, was going to

store a half-hour movie on a 12-inch disk.
Did they get the idea from the LP? Did
they really think they could do it?

The German photo-gizmo, around 1950: a special
camera that supposedly created a sculpture
of what it was pointed at. (But how did
it know what was behind things?)

A weird lens around 1950-- I think it was depic¬
ted as having a blue center and a red peri¬
phery, like a fifties hoodlum tail-light--
that was somehow going to find "residual
traces" of color in black-and-white pictures,
and make 'em into color, zowie, just by
copying them.

Then there was the Ponacolor Cartridge. During
the Days of Madness-- 1968. I think it was
--a rather good little movie gadget was
being pushed by a firm called Panacolor.

It had ten parallel movie and audio tracks,

I believe, on a 70mm strip. The prototypes
were built by Zeiss.

Their idea was that this was a com¬
pact movie projector. 1 kept trying to per¬
suade the company's president that they had
inadvertently designed a splendid device
for branching movies (see "Hyperfilms,"

Exercise for the reader: map out prop¬
erties of the branching and expository
structures implicit in such a device. (It's
one-directional, Gotta rewind when you
get to the end. But you can jump between
tracks when it seems appropriate.)

Anyway, it’s gone now.

DM S

The Great Robert Crumb.

(From Za£ Comix HO.)

"t, _

K .W*i

Itaf ik tVf "

ttitre is Re mus*. 1

— f^er* Ryssiku proveri.

* Irycitii .

* * fr* v 4 » •

HARDWARE, SOFTWARE AND WHATNOT (reprise)

Among the many odd things that have
resulted from the collision of computer people
with educators, publishers and others has been
the respectful imitation of computer ways by
those who didn't quite understand them. Again,
the cargo cult.*

The most dismal of these practices has been
the adoption of the term "software" for any intel¬
lectual or artistic property .** This wholly loses
the distinction, made on the other side of the book,
between:

hardware (programmable equipment)

software (programs, detailed plans
of operation that the hardware
carries out)

contents or data (material which is
worked on by, moved in or
presented by the hardware
under control of the software)

In other words, hardware and software
together make an environment ; data or contents
move and appear in that environment.

The publishing-and-picturefolk have missed
this distinction entirely. Not realizing that their
productions are the contents (material, matter,
data, stuff, message...) that come and go in the
prefabricated hardware-software entironments,
they have mushed this together into a state of
self-feeding confusion.

(The matter has not been helped by the
computer-assisted instruction people— see p. I 5
— whose branching productions seemed to them
enough like computer programs to be called
"software.")

* Primitives exposed to "civilized" man imitat*
his ways ridiculously 4n religious rituals,
hoping for the shipments of canned goods,
etc. that hia behavior seems to bring down
from parts unknown.

**"Mere corroborative detail,
to enhance an otherwise
uninteresting narrative..."

Pooh-Bah,

Lord High
Everything
Else

3. STANDARDIZATION

In order for something to Catch On, it has
to be standardized. Unfortunately, there ts mo¬
tivation for different companies to make their own
little changes in order to restrict users to Its
own products. The best example of how to
avoid this: Philips patented its audio cartridge
to the teeth, but then granted everybody free
use of the patent provided they adhered to the
exact standardization. The result has been the
system's spectacular success, and Philips, rather
than dominating a small market, has a share of
a far larger market, and hence makes more
money. That's a virtue-rewarded kind of story.

The other problem with standardization,
though, is that we tend to standardize too soon.

We standardized on AM radio, even though FM
would probably have been better. (One Major
Armstrong, a great figure in the development
of radio, committed suicide when nobody would
accept FM. If he could only have heard our FM
of today, he might have said "Oh, nuts," and
lived.)

Another example. When they designed the
Touch-Tone phone pad. the Bell people evidently
saw no reason to have it match the adding ma¬
chine panel, so they put "1" in the upper left
rather than the lower left. Now there are lots
of people who use both arrangements, every day,
and at least one of them curses the designers'
lack of consideration.

Another interesting example of Catching
On: during the early sixties, it was fun being
at places where they were just getting Xerox
copiers for the first time. Everyone would ar¬
gue that nobody needed a copier. Then, grud¬
gingly. one would be ordered. The first month's
use invariably would exceed the estimate for the
first year, and go up and up from there.

The worst aspect of the confusion among
the corporations is that certain deficiencies and
crudities of vision slip into the mix. Unless
our new media and their exact ramifications and
concomitants ore planned with the greatest care,
everybody stands to lose. We must understand the
detailed properties of media. (The first question
to ask, when somebody is showing you the
Latest and Greatest, is: "What are the properties
and qualities of the medium?" The followup
questions come easily with experience: How of¬
ten do you have to change it. what are the bran¬
ching options, what part could somebody acci¬
dentally put in backwards, are there distracting
complications? etc. )

I am unpersuaded by McLuhan. His in¬
sights are remarkable, yet suspicious: h£ sup ¬
poses that electronic media are all the same . How
can this be? Here we may now decide what elec¬
tronic media we want in the future— and this de¬
cision, I would say, is one of the most Important
we have to face.

The engineers seem to be quite the oppo¬
site of McLuhan: somehow to them it's always a
multiple-choice, multi-engineering problem, dif¬
ferent every time; "this technique is good for A,
that technique is good for B." But the net ef-
fect is the same : "electronic media are generally
the same." I would claim that the're all differ ¬
ent , all ten million of them (TV being only one
electronic medium out of the lot), and the dif¬
ferences matter very very much, and only a few
can catch on. So it matters very much which.

Some are great, some are lousy, some are sub¬
tly bad, having a locked-in information structure,
built deep-down into the system. (Example:
the fixed "query modes” built into some systems.)

One last point. Everybody only has a
24-hour day. Most people, if they increase con¬
sumption of one medium (like magazines or books)
will cut down on another (like TV). This dras¬
tically reduces the sorts of growth some people
have been expecting. Except . now, if we can
begin to replace some of the inane paper-shuffling
and paper-losing of the business world, and
replace the creepy activities of the school (as now
generally constituted) with a more golden use of
time and mind. Read on.

"The Emperor has no clothes on!"

Small Boy
(name withheld)

>-h

Last year I actually heard a phone company
lecturer aay that in the future we
will hBve "Instant Access to Anything,
Anytime, Anywhere."

What they're pushing is Plcturephone, which
it seems to me is unnecessary, wasteful
and generally unfeasible.

(See: Robert J. Robinson, "Picturephone— Who
Needs It?”, Datamation 15 Nov 71, 152.)

0\l 05'KfTS-

In any medium— written, visual, filmic
or whatever— you generate instantaneously
an atmosphere, a patina, a miasma of style,
involvement, personality (perhaps implicit) ,
outlook, portent. Consider—

The complacency of the Sulzbergers'

New York Times --

The cynicism and mischief of Krassner's
Realist—

The perkiness and sense of freedom of
"Sesame Street"—

The personalized, focussed foreboding

of Orson Welles films: as distinct
from the impersonalized, focussed
foreboding of Hitchcock—

Next to this matter of mood, all else pales:
the actual constraints and structures of media,
the expositions and complications of particular
cognitive works and presentations within media,
are as nothing.

IN THE WSHPOrf

Time after time, the educational establishment has
thought some great revolution would come through getting
new kinds of equipment into the classroom.

First it was movies. More recently it's been "audio¬
visual” stuff, teaching machines, film loops and computer-
assisted instruction.

In no cases have the enthusiasts for these systems
seen how the equipment would fit into conventional edu¬
cation— or, more likely, screw the teacher up. Teachers
are embarrassed and flustered when they have to monkey
with equipment in addition to everything else, and fitting
the available canned materials into their lesson plans
doesn’t work out well, either.

The only real possibilities for change lie in systems
that will change the instructor's position from a manager
to a helper. Many teachers will like this, many will not.

NV (MfPJL ATItW

when somebody shows you an electronic or other
presentational system, device or whatever.

A certain kind of slight-of-hand goes on.
It's very easy to get fooled. They may show
you one thing and persuade you you’ve seen
another.

And if you're canny enough to ask about
a feature you haven't seen they'll always say,

"WE'RE WORKING ON IT."

It's only dishonest if they say, "It'll be ready
next month."

THWttTOi

A self-employed repairman of mobile homes
named Donald Wells has invented a solar-powered
tombstone that can show movies and still pictures
of the departed, along with appropriate organ
music and any last words or eulogies selected
by the deceased.

The device is activated by a remote control
device carried by a visitor to the gravesite.

The movies would be shown on a twelve-inch screen
mounted next to the epitaph.

"You could also have pictures of Christ as¬
cending to heaven or Christ on the cross, whatever
you want," says Wells. "It adds a whole new di¬
mension to going to the cemetery...."

Cleveland Plain Dealer
(Quoted in National Lampoon
True Paata. May 74, 10.)

3y minicomputer, through cablee and puffs of air.
©Walt Disney Productions.

DM 6

VIDEO rREAKS

VIDEO, it*, 4 n ,0 "

would you believe there vao television broadcasting
over the airwave* in the nineteen-twenties? The thing la,
it used bizarre -pinning equipment beoau*. there wer^no
cut- (-ee "Lightning in a Bottle," nearby.) Only with
«!. development of radar in World War II did there .1.0
cone a practicable Cathode Ray Tube, making home televi.-
ion feasible.

But the big companies were at first very conservative
in their marketing, figuring television would be a luxury
item onlv. It took a man named Madman Hunt*, who carica¬
tured himself In a Napoleon hat, to see that million* would
buy television If the price w«s right. So he "JJ* ™
Hunt* TV in the late fortie*. A* I recall, the Hunta TV
cost $100 and had one tuning knob . (This wa* less lntimi
dating than the row of knobs on more expensive sets.) I
don’t know how Muntz came out on it all, but hl * ® f

the mass market made the bigger corporation, realize it was
there. (This same thing may yet happen again in newer
media.)

Originally all there was was Krazy Hat and Farmer
Brown cartoons. But behold, sooner than you could say
"vertical hold," there were Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca
on the Admiral Show, and we were off.

A quarter of a century later, the best of television
is no better end the bulk of television is about as bad

a* It aver waa.

We "understand” television. That is. we know what a
TV show is, how it fits together and so on.

ICECUBES

But whst people don't realize about TV is that the
governing feature is the time-slot . In any medium with
time-slots, whether TV, radio or classroom education, the
time-slot rules behavior. Whatever can happen is as con¬
strained as Icecubes in a tray.

This is the limiting factor when optimists try to
use TV for teaching. If it’s coming over a cable, every¬
thing has to be scheduled around it, and the contents are
clipped and constrained to fit the time-slot. It may be
better with videotape.

CABLES

In the last dozen years, Cable TV, or CATV, has
become big business. A Video Cable is s high-capacity
electrical carrier that runs through a given neighbor¬
hood or region. Business and individuals may "sub¬
scribe" and get their own sets hooked onto the cable.

What this does first of all Is improve reception.

The fouled-up video picture caused by such extraneous
objects as the World Trade Center in New York can be
corrected by hooking into the video cable: you get a
nice, sharp picture.

In addition, though, the cable offers extra channels.

Now, the businessmen who have been throwing togeth¬
er these video cable outfits are aiming for something.

They have been thinking that these extra channels would
net them a lot of money: by showing things on them that
can't be offered on the air— highbrow drama, or perhaps
X-rated stuff— they could get extra revenue. (You'd pay
extra to watch it by buying an unscrambler, or whatever.)

This is turning into somewhat of a disappointment.

The cable people had foreseen, evidently, that people
would stay home in droves to see the new offerings on the
cable. In Show Business it’s easy to forget, though, that
everybody has only twentyfour hours in a day, and far les9
than 24 hours to dispose of freely; so every leisure occu¬
pation is competing with every other leisure occupation.
Moreover, the residual leisure occupation, when there's no¬
thing else to do, is TV. It would seem that few people
would watch more television if it were better, but many
would watch less if they could afford to go out.

EXTRA CHANNELS

In recent years, a number of extra channels have been
made available by law. These are the UHF, or Ultra High
Frequency channels. These, like cables, represent a con¬
sumer breakthrough but will have only negligible impact.

THE PROBLEM OF ORGANIZATION

Whatever else you may say about them, the networks
and TV stations are at least organized as going concerns
within the institutional structures of the country. Ideas
of "community television" and other such schemes which call
for some new form of social organization to spring forth
are about as plausible as "community control" of schools
and police— or at best likely to be as influential as
"coimnunlty social centers."

INTERACTIVE TV?

Some people, I won't say who, have gotten a lot of
money for something they call "interactive television."

What this turns out to mean is any form of computer time¬
sharing that will use home TV terminals and video cables.
The questions are why use home TV terminals and video
cables, insofar as they would seem to promise only com¬
paratively low-grade performance; and whether these people
have thought out anything about the potential characteris¬
tics of the various media they propose with such abandon.
Nothing I have seen or heard about this is reassuring.

"ALTERNATE" TELEVISION, or

In recent years, many young folk* have taken to video
aa a way of life . In the most extreme caeea they say things
like "the written word is dead,” prompted perhaps by McLuhan.

I have found it rather difficult to talk to video freake.

(It may be that aome of them are against spoken words as well.)
I really just don’t know what they're about.

The work of thee# people is as exuberant as it is strange.
I haven't seen much of it or understood much of what I have
seen.

In some cases, "alternative television" simply means docu¬
mentaries outside the normal framework of ownership and report¬
ing. In one example cited by Shamberg (see bibliography),
video freaks did excellent coverage of the 1968 Republican conven
tion. People were allowed to speak for themselves, unlike "nor¬
mal" TV journalism where "commentators" tell you what they see.

Now, this is hardly revolutionary} it is just good documen¬
tary-making that shucks dumb traditions artistically, much like
the Pennebaker films. However, video enthusiasts claim it is
somehow different, and indeed claim that video is different in
principle from films. I have been unable to get a satisfactory
clarification of this idea.

Video is being used in other ways, harder to understand, by
artist- (best defined as persons called "artists" within the art
world today). Very odd "video pieces" have been shown at art
shows, where the object 9eems to be to confuse the viewer— or
knock him into a condition of Enlarged Perspective, shall we say.
And a variety of non-objective videotapes are now being created.
(A gallery show in 1969 was called "Video as a Creative Medium"

— implying sarcastically that it had not been before, on the
airwaves.)

Some video freaks think of video as intrinsically radical or
Revolutionary. In this respect they differ interestingly from,
say, the editors of the National Lampoon . The editors of the
National Lampoon appear to be political radicals, but do not sug¬
gest that the very media of cartoon and joke-piece are themselves
revolutionary, some video freaks appear to be persuaded that the
medium of television itself is inherently a vehicle for change.

I can understand one interesting sense in which this may be
true: Shamberg talks about video as a method of self-discovery .
Seeing yourself on TV does, of course, confer certain insights.
But shamberg suggests it may expand people’s consciousness in
larger ways— allowing people to see the bleakness of certain
pursuits (he uses the example of Shopping), for instance. But
if this does hit home to people, it doesn't seem to me to be the
medium that's doing it but the selected content— as in all pre¬
vious media. Maybe I've missed the point in some way.

These developments are all very interesting. It can be
hoped that those trying to develop new forms of communication
will make an effort to communicate better with those who, like
the author, often cannot comprehend what they are doing.

" But decentralized transmission of
information should be dominant, not fugi¬
tive. Each citizen of Hedia-America
should guaranteed as a birthright access
to the means of distribution of informa¬
tion. "

(Shamberg, p. 67)

Hell, we went down there with our
Porta-Pak and tried to take it inside.

A guard came over and said we couldn't
and even threw one of us out of the booth
while the other was inside. A guard
telling you what to do in a cybernetic
environment?”

(Shamberg, p. 53)

("Cybernetic" is evidently a code
word here for what they think is
good, true, beautiful and inevi¬
table. ce. p. D/1

About the only generalization to be
made is that community video will be
subversive to any group, bureaucracy, or
individual which feels threatened by a
coalescing of grassroots consciousness.
Because not only does decentralized TV
serve as an early warning system, it puts
people in touch with one another about
common grievances."

(Shamberg, p. 57)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Michael Shamberg and Raindance Corporation,
Guerrilla Television . (Holt, $4.)

TUBE, an underground TV magazine. $8/yr.
TUBE, 1826 Spaight St., Madison, HI
53704.

Cable Report, $7/yr. 192 N. Clark St.,

Room 607, Chicago. Samples $1.

"SCANDAL IS RAMPANT in the cable
television industry. Only Cable Re¬
port follows cable TV developments
from the citizen's perspective and
tells you what’s happening and what's
going wrong." Ad in Chicago READER.

Nicholas Johnson, How to Talk Back to Your
Television Set . Bantam, 95t

If wt HtyrtT rv whckj we

Wt'3 H*vc K BfntUYSTWVoU.

TK’t W 1 ok t 1 *- Uj|"

Ike KD

UWWMG

IN A BOTTLE

th( Cat>{oj£-my rose

A cathode-ray tube is actually a bottle filled
with a vacuum and some funny electrical equip¬
ment. The equipment in the neck of the bottle
shoot b a beam of electrons toward the bottom of
the bottle.

This beam of electrons is called, more or less for
historical reasons, a cathode ray . Think of it as
a straw that can be wiggled in the bottle.

Actually the bottle is shaped so as to have
a large viewing area at the bottom (the screen),
and this screen is coated with something that glows
when electrons hit it. Such a chemical is called
a phosphor .

Now, two useful things can be done with this
beam.

1) It can be made brighter by increasing

the voltage, which increases the
number of electrons in the beam.

2) The beam can be moved! That is, it

can be made to play around the face
of the tube the way you can slosh
the stream of a garden hose back
and forth on the lawn; or wiggle a
straw in a coke bottle. The beam
can be moved with either magnetism
or static electricity. This is applied
in the neck of the bottle— or even
from outside the neck— by deflection
plates . whose electrical pulsations
determine the pattern the beam
traces on the screen. (Note that the
beam can be moved on the screen at
great speed.)

The vertical deflection plates can pull the
beam up or down on the screen, controlled by
a signal to them;

the horizontal deflection plates can pull the beam
sideways on the screen, controlled by a signal
to them.

By sending combined signals to both hori¬
zontal and vertical deflection plates, we can make
the end of the beam-- a bright dot on the screen,
sometimes called a flying spot -- jump around in
any pattern on the screen. A repeated pattern
of the beam on the face of the CRT is called a
raster .

From these two capabilities— brightening
and moving the beam-- a number of very special
technologies emerge:

TELEVISION uses a zig-zag scanning pat¬
tern which repeats over and over.

This zigzag pattern is Biways the
same, night and day.

You can usually see the lines clearly
on a black-and-white set. The pic¬
ture consists of the changing pattern
of brightness of this beam, which
comes in over the airwaves us the
television signal.

£ZI

DM 7

RADAR DISPLAY uses a CRT to show reflec
ted images around where the radar
antenna is standing. This uses a
scanning raster of a star shape,
brightening the beam when reflected

COMPUTER CRT GRAPHICS generally use
the CRT in still another way: the
beam is moved around the screen in
straight lines from point to point.
(Between different parts of the pic¬
ture the beam is darkened, turned
very low so you don't see it.)

Because the image on a normal
CRT fades quickly, the computer must
ordinarily draw the picture again and
again and again. (Methods for this
are discussed on p. PH Z2*3.)

SPECIAL KINDS OF CATHODE-RAY TUBES

The CRT is not merely a single invention,
but an entire family of inventions. The ordinary
CRT, which we have discussed, is viewed at one
end by a human being, has an image which fades
quickly, and can have its flying spot driven in
any kind of raster or pattern.

Here are some other kinds of CRT:

The picture transmitter , which has different
versions and names: Vidicon, Image Orthicon,
Plumbicon, etc. THIS IS THE MAGICAL DEVICE
THAT MAKES THE TELEVISION CAMERA WORK,
AND YET, BY GOSH, IT'S JUST ANOTHER CRT.
Except instead of the picture coming into it as
an electrical signal and out of it as an optical
image, the picture comes into it as an optical
image and goes out of it as an electrical signal.

How can this be?

The tube sits inside the television camera,
which is an ordinary camera, like, with a lens
projecting a picture through a dark chamber
onto a sensitive surface. But instead of the
surface being a film , the surface is the faceplate
of a CRT with some kind of a special pickup
phosphor:

TV C*W-

The electron beam, which is just like any
other electron beam, is made to zigzag across
the faceplate in a standard television raster.

And the special phosphor of the tube measures
the brightness of the picture at the spot the
beam is hitting. I have no idea how this hap¬
pens, but it’s chemical and electronical and mys¬
terious, and iB based on the way the phosphor
interacts with the light from one side and the
electrons from the other side at the same time.
Anyhow . a measurement signal comes out of the
faceplate , indicating how bright the projected
picture is in the very spot the electron beam is
now hitting.

As the beam crisa-crossea the faceplate in
the zig-zag television raster, then, a continuously
changing output signal from the faceplate shows
the brightnesses all across the successive lines
of the scan.

And that is the television signal. Together
with synchronizing information, it’s what goes
out over the airwaves, down your antenna and
into your set. Your set, obeying the synchron¬
izing information, brightens and darkens its own
beam in proportion to the brightness of the
individual teeny regions of the faceplate in the
television camera. And this produces the scin¬
tillating surface we call television.

The color tube is a weird beast indeed.
There are several types, but we'll only talk
about the simplest (and many think the best),
Sony's Trinitron(TM) tube.

This is an ordinary CRT which has, in¬
stead of a uniform coating on the faceplate, tiny
vertical stripes of three primary colors— red,
blue and green. (You thought the primary col¬
ors were red, blue and yellow, didn't you. If
you're mixing pigments that happens to be true.
For some ungodly reason, however, if you’re
mixing lights . the colors that yield all others
turn out to be red, green and blue; it turns out
that yellow light can be made out of red and
green. If you don't believe me go to a chintzy
hardware store, get a red and a green bulb,
turn 'em on and see what happens in a white-
walled room.)

At any rate, color television uses addi¬
tional color signals, and in the Trinitron these
control the response of the faceplate. If the
color signal says "green" as the electron dot
crosses a certain part of the screen, the color
signal tells the green stripes that they're free
to light up when hit. If it's Yellow Time, the
signal tells both the red stripes and the green,
and so side by side they light up red and green,
as the beam crosses them, but the total effect
from more than a few inches is Yellow.

Most American color TV sets, however, at
least up till this year, used something very dif¬
ferent, something entirely weird called the
Shadow Mask Tube. I'll spare you the picture,
but there were several different electron beams
— often referred to jokingly as the "red electron
beam," "blue electron beam" and "green electron
beam," though of course they were identical in
character. These hit a perforated sieve, up
near the screen, called the shadow mask , and
the color signal tweaked the unwanted beams
so they did not hit different-colored phosphor
dots that were intricately arranged on the screen.
I’m sorry I started to explain this.

Multi gun tubes have more than one electron
gun and more than one electron beam. They
can be used in different ways (aside from the
old shadow-mask TV tube, mentioned above).

The storage CRT comes in two flavors:
viewable and non-viewable. But what it does
is very neat: It holds the picture on the screen.
The mechanisms for this are of various types,
and it's all weird and electronic, but the idea
is that once something is put on the screen by
the electron beam, it stays and stays. Up to
several minutes, usually. The main manufac¬
turers are Tektronix. Princeton Electronic Pro¬
ducts, and Hughes Aircraft; each of these three
has a product that works by a different method.

Note: Tektronix* tube i$ built into a num¬
ber of different computer displays, and is rec¬
ognizable by Its Kelly green surface. They
themselves make complete computer terminals
around thiB scope for $4000 and up, but lots of
other people put it in their products also. It
shows whatever has already been put on the
screen, and the electron beam does not have to
repeat the action. However, it usually only
stays lit for about a minute.

Princeton Electronic Products (guess where)
is a much smaller outfit, so perhaps it is appro¬
priate that they make a much smaller storage
tube. It is about one inch square at its storage
end, and you don't look at it directly. Instead,
an image can be stored on it either wth a TV
raster or by computer-driven line drawing.

After the image is stored on it, though, it func¬
tions as a TV camera : the picture stored on the
plate can be read out with a scanning raster,
exactly as if it were a picture transmitter in a
television camera. The Princeton folks have
built a quite expensive, but quite splendid,
complete terminal around this device: it can hold
both video and computer-drawn pictures, super¬
imposed or combined, and sends them back out
in standard black-and-white TV. $12000.

CRTS which bring in a picture one way
(such as a video raster) and send it back out
another way (such as by letting a computer
search out individual points) are called scan
converters.

A word about this last method. It is often
desired by computer people to turn a picture
into some form of data (see p. | (J ). Scan conver¬
ters, usually by the three manufacturers named
above, can be hooked up to let the computer pro¬
gram poke around in the picture and measure the
brightness of the picture in arbitrary places.

A device which examines the brightness of some¬
thing in arbitrary places is called a flying spot
scanner.) Here are some different kinds of
flying-spot scanners:

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For instance, one gun can be driven in a
video raster, to show television, while another
gun can be used as a computer display, drawing
individual lines with no regard to the TV pattern.

1 have heard it said that it might be pos¬
sible to build a CRT with a changeable mirror
surface: that is, the screen becomes mirrored
temporarily where it is being hit with the elec¬
tron beam. Interesting. This would mean that
you could make computer displays (and TV)
bright and projectable to any degree, say. by
pouring a super-intensity laser beam on it. "Be
great for writing 'Coca-Cola' on the moon," says
a friend of mine. If you believe in astral pro¬
jection.

BIBLIOGRAPHY : Color TV Training Manual , Sa»a & Co./
Bobbs-Merrlll ($7), is a veil-illustrated and
Intelligent introduction to the TV use of CRTs,

III

RETURN of

SW 5 _

peocssscE.

Dan Sandin,
professor of Art
at V. of Illinois,

Chicago Circle,
says very vise
things (having
been a physicist!,
and We vers going
to have a whole
section on that,
but as you can see,
there wasn't room. |

Daniel J. Sendin (pronounced san-DEEN) has
■pent the lest several years putting together a
device he currently call* the IP (Image Proces¬
sor). It’s * system of circuits for changing
and colorizing TV. What follows Is the first
published description of It.

I regret that the following 1* probably
one of the most difficult sections of this book.
(If you know nothing about video, read M i r .. n i qm g-
first.) Dtir>-7

The Ides is basically to create a complete¬
ly generalized system for altering the color and
brightness of video images. (I.e., the system
does not move them on the screen. Thus it
differs from the Computer Image line of video-
twlstlng graphics systems, which alter positions
of objects; see p. DM ^ . Note also that

r'ather similar facilities exist as part of, e.g.,
the Scanimate syatem, f• DM 31 • >

This means that basically Sandin's system
plays with the part of the TV signal called z,
or brightness (as distinct from x or y, the sig¬
nals for horizontal and vertical movement of the
)-

P M) 6 7

Now, as a physicist and field-theoretician,
Sandin approached this as a problem in generality;
and Indeed, the style of generalization should be
appreciated. Sandin repeatedly chose flexibility
and power rather than obviousness In the parts he
created. The resulting system Is both parsimon¬
ious and productive.

His first Important decision was that all
parta of the syatem should be compatible and ldlot -
proof . so that any user could frivolously plug It
together any way at all without burning out the
circuits.

Indeed, Sandin decided to build It like a music
synthesizer: by making all systems electrically com¬
patible (as they are on the Moog and its progeny),
any signal can be used to alter or Influence any
other signal. This is a very profound decision,
whose far-flung results have not yet been fully ex¬
plored even among Sandin'a rather fanatical stud¬
ents.

Basically, the Incoming video image Is "strip¬
ped" of its synchronizing Information, so that all
signals turning up in the guts of the machine may
be freely modified. Only at the final output stage
are the jots and tittles of the video signal put back

Thus the first and last blocks of the Image
Processor act like bookends, between which the other
modules have their fun. The firat block makes the
incoming signal Into "naked" video, the last block
dresses it up respectably again.

For the sake of clarity we will refer to the
outputs as pictures , or as black, white or grey,
which they would be if they went straight out to a
screen; but they may be turned back Into the system
and function as inputs as well. "White" means +.5
volts, "black" means -.5 volts.

Let us consider, then, Sandin's modules and what
they do Individually to the brightness signal i.
Combinations are beyond the scope of this article

What Dan's proaeesor
can do to television
is not to be believed.

Savage colors or
delicate off Whites,
solarisatione and
pictures on top of
pictures. Then thr .■

"video feedback"

(pointing a TV carter .
at a TV screen),
the system can generate
throbbing animated
oobwebs and spirals
of its own. Shown.

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1. ADDER-MULTIPLIER,
channels, either directly

This combines two input
as specified by a third.

Diagram of how hologram is made, p. DM Z°.

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The channel A inputs are added together and-mul¬
tiplied by C; the channel B inputs are added together
and multiplied by the reverse of C; both results are
added to make the output. (NOTE: this unit is used
among other things, for fades and keying.)

2. COMPARATOR. This Is like Kodalith film,mak-
lng an image into stark black and white. Its output
Is pure black or white. One Input signal (the video)

Is compared with another input signal (reference level,
other video, whatever).

While one Is greater the output goes all black,
snj while the other Is greater It goes all white.

3. VALUE SCRAMBLER. This Is a single module
dividing the picture Into eight levels. It may be
thought of as eight of the above comparators, divid¬
ing the brightness spectrum by quantum jumps. The
floor and celling of the signal to be divided are
specified by the two control channels, but the divid¬
ing lines between them are then automatically deter¬
mined. Each corresponding output level may be con¬
trolled by a knob.

v^e

Thus from a range of Input values, we get an
output step-function each of whose brightnesses is in¬
dividually adjustable.

Note that these devices may be arranged in
parallel, thus dividing the brightness spectrum into
as many levela as desired.

4. OSCILLATOR MODULE (very unusual). Sandin's
oscillators are voltage controlled, just like the ones
in music synthesizers. However, if given any kind of
a sync signal, they lock into the nearest multiple
(or submultiple) within the specified range. (But
then the control signal,if any, tweaks it higher or
lower.) Standardized output comes in sine, square and
sawtooth.

Holography Is one of those Modern Miracles
that we really can't get Into. It is mind-blowing,
influential, and of unclear Importance.

Theoretically predicted by Dennis Gabor, the
hologram (Creek "whole picture") was finally made
to work in the late fifties by Leith and Upatnleka.
Since then dozens of other types of holograms have
been experimented with, including color holograms,
movie holograms, video holograms, audio holograms
and gracious know what.

Basically a hologram Is an all-around picture.
It doesn't look like a picture, but looks like a
smudged fingerprint or other mistake of some kind.

Yet it is a marvel.

A basic hologram (— actually it should be
called a laser hologram or Lelth-Upatnleks holo¬
gram, but we’ve no time for such distinctions—)
is one of these smudgy pictures which, when viewed
under a proper laser setup,shows you a three-
dimensional picture. Worse than that: as you move
your head, the picture changes correspondingly.

It looks, not like the flat surface It Is, but like
a lit-up box with a model In It.

What does the hologram do? Actually It re¬
creates, not a single view, but the entire tangle
of light rays that are reflected from the real ob¬
ject. Even down to bright reflections, which
scintillate in the usual way, as from chromium.

The only problem: ordinarily they have to be.
used with laser light, which is spookily one-
colored .

Notes from all over: ert stylist Salvador Dali
presided at an unveiling of "the world's first 360°
hologram" at a New York gallery not long ago. The
subject was song stylist Alice Cooper.

The Haunted House at Disney World in Florida
will ride you through a building full of holograms.
That's one way to move through ghosts, all right.

There is a New York School of Holography.

6. FUNCTION GENERATOR. This device is hardest to
explain. Let*6 do It in terms of that first module, the
Adder-Multiplier. Know how the Adder-Multiplier puts out
either a positive or a negative picture, depending on
which input you select?

r ^

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The two planned uses were A) with a sync, to
generate fixed patterns, and B) without a sync, to
generate movable patterns. If both Inputs are used,
it becomes a stubborn lock-on voltage-controlled os¬
cillator, which tends to grab at passing submultiples.

5. DIFFERENTIATOR. Basically this sees edges In
the picture, or any other part of a scan-line whose
color Is changing. Its output Is proportional to
chanRe occurring In the brightness of a scan-line,

As the Input goes from black to white Its output Is
light; as the input goes from white to black its out¬
put Is dark. (The input hole selected determines the
amount of multiplication.)

nesses into three ranges, and multiplies each range posi¬
tive or negative . In proportion to ita own knob setting.

Thus the combined setting of the three knobs generat¬
es a "function," or curve, from the slopes of the Individ¬
ual settings. See graph. What in photography is called
"solar!zatIon" represents Just one of these combined set¬
tings. The others are nameless.

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7. COLOR ENCODER MODULE. This is Che last block.
Into It go three signals, the desired rsd, blue and green;
and out comes standard NTSC video.

mf Eaa&kcs

"I aing the body electric ..." — Walt Whitman

There are various people who want to at¬
tach electronics to people’s bodies and brains.

There are basically two starting points
for this ambition. One is authoritarian, the
other is altruistic. 1 am not sure both schools
are not equally dangerous, however.

Let’s consider first the authoritarians.

Prof. Delgado of Yale has demonstrated that any
creature's behavior can be controlled by jolts
to the brain. Delgado has dealt especially with
the negative circuits of the brain, that is,
places where an electrical impulse causes pain
(or "negative reinforcement"). In Delgado’s
most stunning demonstration, he stopped a char¬
ging bull with just a teeny radio signal. En¬
thusiastically Delgado tells us how fine this
sort of thing would be for controlling Undesir¬
able Human Behavior, too.

Now, let's consider just what we're talking
about. In these experiments, needles are im¬
planted in the creature's brain. This can in¬
volve removing a section of the skull, or it can
be done merely by hammering a long hollow needle
straight into the skull and thus the brain.

The researcher, or whatever we want to call
him, had better know what he is doing. But due
to the remarkable mass action of the brain, the
destruction caused by such needles will have not
observable effects if done properly.

The hollow needle, once in place, becomes a
tube for shielded electrical wires, whose bare
metallic tips may then be used to carp' little
electrical jolts, to whatever brain tissue is
reached by the tip of the needle, whenever tiny
signals are applied.

Now there are regions of the brain, distri¬
buted irregularly through its mysterious contents,
which are loosely called the "pleasure" and
"pain" systems. They are called that because of
what the organism does when you jolt it in those
places*. (We do not know whether jolts to these
areas really cause pleasure or pain, because
these things haven't been done to human beings.
Yet. The creatures it has been done to can't
tell us just how it feels; thus "pleasure" and
"pain" are in quotation marks. For now.)

Anyway, what happens is this. If you stim¬
ulate a creature in the "pain" system it tends to
stop what it is doing-- this is called negative
reinforcement-- and if you stimulate it in the
pleasure system, it tends to do more of what it
was doing. Positive reinforcement.

Now, to some people this suggests wonderful
possibilities.

Delgado, for instance, believes that this
technology gives us everything we need for the
control of Anti-Social Tendencies. Criminals,
psychopaths and Bad Guys in general-- all can be
effectively "cured" (i.e., put on their best be¬
havior) by these techniques. All we have to do,
heh heh, is get into their heads, heh heh, habits
of proper behavior. And with these new techniques
of reinforcement, we can really teach 'em.

Unfortunately Delgado is probably right.

In principle this is just a drastic form of
behavior control on the B.F. Skinner model (depio
Nineteen Eighty-F our and A Clockwork
Orange). The new system is more stark - and start-
ling because of its violation of the individual’s
body interior, but not in principle different.

Skinner has the same naive, simpleminded sc
utions for everything. All "we" have to do¬
using "we" to mean society, the good guys good
guys acting on behalf of society, etc.-- is con¬
trol the behavior of the bad guys, and everythir
will be better, and "we" can accomplish anythim
"we" desire.

The reader may see several problems with this.

In the first place (and the last), there is
the obvious question of who we are, and if we are
going to control other people, who is going - Eo
control us.

Even if that weren’t a problem, there is the
more simpleminded question of who in the existing
system would use such techniques. It turns out,
of course, that they would be added to what is
laughably called the Correctional System, or even
more laughably called the Justice System. All
the sadists you could possibly want work there.

(And no doubt some very nice guys-- but experi¬
ments have demonstrated horrifically that decent
people, turned into "guards" even for a short time,
adopt the patterns of brutality we have known from
time immemorial.)

So, like truncheons and electric shock ther¬
apy and solitary confinement and everything else,
these techniques-- if they are used-- will enter
the realm of Available Punishments, not to be used
with clinical precision but with gratuitously bru¬
talizing intent, new tools for punitivity and
sadism. The "correctional” system would have to
be magically corrected itself before such tools
could he employed without simply making things
worse . And the prospoct is not good.

Such schemes grow, of course, from a carica¬
ture of the malefactor-- thinking him to be some
sort of miswired circuit, rather than a human being
caught up in anger, pain, humiliation and unem¬
ployment.

(There are also a lot of canards about Free
Will, but these do nothing for either side -in this
controversy.)

DM 9

ftVCf\0-ftC00STlt J)|L£>C>Kl£S

I originally hadn't intended to include any
thing like thin in the book, wanting it to be a
family-atyle access catalog and all that, but this
particular item seems fairly important.

Remember how we laughed at the Orgasmo-
tron in Woody Allen's Sleeper? WeU. it turns
out not to be a joke.

An individual named How (not Howard)
Wachspreas, electronickcr-in-realdenee at a San
Francisco radio station, has been developing just
that, except that he has more elevated purposes
in mind. The secret was broken to the world
in Oui magazine earlier this year; but Hefner,
the publisher, evidently held back the more
startling photographs of a model in electronically-
induced ecstasy.

Wachspress’ devices transpose sound (as
audio signals) into feelings ; you touch your
body with an open-ended tube or other soft
fixture attached to his device— which in turn
is attached to a hi-fi.

NEW FACULTIES

Starting from an entirely different outlook,
various designers and bio-engineers are trying
to add things to the human body and nervous sys¬
tem, for the voluntary benefit of the recipient.

A number of research and development efforts
are aimed at helping those with sensory impair¬
ments, and electronics obviously is going to
involved.

An example: a firm called Listening, Inc.
in Boston, founded by Wayne Batteau (whom John W.
Campbell considered one of the Great Men of Our
Time), devised a system for helping the totally
deaf to hear. Supposedly this could transmit the
actual sensation of hearing into the nervous sys¬
tem by some scarcely-understood form of electri¬
cal induction. The machine was sold off; whether
it ever got a safety rating I don't know.

This is the sort of thing people would like
to do for the blind, as well.

The sensations, it is claimed, are pro¬
found and moving. You may take them anywhere
on your body; the effect is deeply relaxing and
emotionally engrossing. Wachspress thinks he
has reached an entire neurological system that
wasn't known before, much like OldB’ discovery
of the "pleasure center" in the brain; he sees it
as a new modality of experience and a general¬
ization of music and touch. That is the main
point. "Hyper-reality" is where he says it gets
you: a point curiously congruent with the author's
own notions of hypertext and hypermedia as ex¬
tensions of the mental life.

This said, we can consider the prurient
aspects of Wachspress' Auditac and Teletac devi¬
ces (which he intends to market in a couple of
years as hi-fi accessories, b'gosh). When
played with the right audio, in the right places,
and a good operator at the controls, they provide
a sexual experience said to be of a high order.

Now, in principle, it might be possible to
transmit an image in some way to the actual vis¬
ual area of the cerebral cortex. (This might or
might not involve opening the skull.) Somebody's
working on it.

In a related trend, numerous design groups
are attempting to extend the capabilities of the
human body, by means of things variously called
possums , waldoes and telefactors .

"Possums" (from Latin "I can") are devices
to aid the handicapped in moving, grasping and
controlling. Whatever motions the person can
make are electronically transposed to whatever
realm of control is needed, such as typewriting
or guiding a wheelchair. ("Waldo" is Heinlein’s
term for a possum that can be operated at a dis¬
tance.)

In the space program, though, they call them
telefactors . A telefactor is a device which con-
verts or adapts body movements by magnification
or remote mimicking. Unlike possums, they are
meant to be operated by people with normal facul¬
ties, but to provide, for example, superhuman
strength: cradled in a larger telefactor body, a
man can pick up immense loads, as the movements
of his arms are converted to the movements of the
greater robot arms.

Telefactors can also work from far, far away.
Thus a man sitting in a booth can control, with the
movements of his own arms, the artificial arms of
a robot vehicle on another planet.

(This whole realm of sensory and motor mechan¬
ics and transposition is an important aspect of
what I call "Fantics," discussed on pp. t>i>i 7 a-ft).

Then there are those who, like Jlow Wachspress
(see nearby), want to expand man's senses beyond
the ordinary, into new sensory realms, by hooking
him to various electronics.

THOUGHTS

There are two problems in all of this. The
first and worst, of course, is who controls and
what w»^.l hold them back from the most evil doings.
Recent history, both at home and abroad, suggests
the answers are discouraging.

The second problem, wispish and theoretical
next to that other, is whether in turning toward
bizarre new pleasures and involvements, we will not
lose track of all that is human. (Of course this
is a question that is asked by somebody whenever
anything at all changes. But that doesn’t mean it
is always inappropriate.)

In the face both of potential evil and dehum¬
anization, though, we can wish there were some
boundary, some good and conspicuous stopping place
at which to say; no further , like the three-mile
limit in international law of old. I personally
think it should be the human skin . Perhaps that's
old-fashioned, being long breached by the Pace¬
maker. But what other lines can we draw?

Wachspress' work ties in interestingly with
today’s "awareness" movement, of which Esalen
is the spiritual center, which holds that we have
gotten out of touch with our bodies, our feelings,
our native perceptions. As such, the Wachspress
machines may be an unfolding-mechanism for the
unfeeling tightness of Modern Man-- as well as
a less profound treatment for "marital difficulties"
and Why-Can't-Johnny-Come-Lately.

Inscrutable San Francisco! Wachspress
gave a number of demonstrations of his devices
in Bay Area churches , until he became disturbed
at immodest uses of the probe by female communi¬
cants who had stood in line to try the machine.

(Auditac, Ltd., Dept. CLB,

1940 Washington St.,

San Francisco CA 94109.)

Harry Mendell, a good friend of mine, rigged an
interesting experiment while he was still in high school.

He used a little Hewlett-Packard minicomputer, which
the manufacturer had generously loaned to his Knights of
Columbus Computer Club of Haddonfleld, N.J.

Harry hooked the Hewlett-Packard up to a CRT display
(see pp. an fe-7, 6•««;>) • At the top of the CRT, following
his program, the computer continuously displayed the let¬
ters of the alphabet. A little marker (called a cursor )
would skip along underneath the letters, acting as a mar¬
ker for each of them in turn.

Harry rigged one more external device: a set of elec¬
trodes. These would be strapped, harmlessly, to the head
of a subject. Harry's computer program used these elec¬
trodes to measure alpha rhythm, one of the mysterious
pulses in the brain that come and go.

Every time the subject flashed alpha, Harry's program
would copy the letter above the cursor to the bottom of
the screen.

Sitting in this rig, subjects were able to learn,
rather quickly, TO TYPE WORDS AND SENTENCES. Just by
flashing alpha rhythm when the cursor was under the right
letters.

Jubilant, Harry showed this setup to an eminent neuro¬
physiologist from a great university nearby, a man special¬
ising in electrode hookups. Harry was a highschool student
and did not understand about Professionalism.

“What's so great about that?" sniffed the eminent
professional. "I can type faster."

So Harry dropped that and went on to other stuff.

At a tine when our "highest" leaders show
themselves preoccupied with low retaliations and
lower initiatives, we can wonder indeed if it is
not more important to prevent anyone from ever
getting this kind of control over humans than to
facilitate it.

The prospects are horrorshow, me droogies
BIBLIOGRAPHY

T.D. Sterling, E.A. Bering, Jr., S.V. Pollack
and H. Vaughan, Jr., Visual Prosthesis :

The Interdisciplinary Dialog . ACM
Monograph. $21.

OZI

DM 10

PiCftfe Fepce&Kfcs-

"Picture proceeding" ie an important technology,
largely separate from the rest of computer graphics.

It means taking an incoming picture, usually a photo¬
graph, and doing something to it. (Some now call this
area "computer pictorlcs.")

First of all, there Is Image enhancement . This
means taking pictures, dividing them into points whose
brightness is separately measured,and then using spec¬
ial techniques for making the picture better- To
people familiar with photography, this may seem im¬
possible; to photogrsphers it is a maxim that photographs
always lose quality at each step. Nevertheless, various
mathematical techniques such as Fourier Analysis (men¬
tioned elsewhere) do just that, producing a new data
structure improving on the original data. Surfaces ap¬
pear smoother, edges sharper.

(These techniques have been extensively used to
clean up photographs sent back from our unmanned space
vehicles— both those used exploring other planets and
those spying on our own— see Secret Sentries in Space ,
Bibliography.)

Then there are recognizers — programs that look at
the data structure from an input picture, and try to
discern the lines, comers and other features of the
picture. (While your eye instantly sees these things,
computers do not , and must look at the dots of a picture
one-by-one. How to analyze pictures in such tedious se¬
quences is no simple matter.)

For recognizing more complex objects In pictures—
boxes, spheres, faces or whatever— more complex struc¬
ture-analyzing programs are necessary. As the possibil¬
ities of what might be in a picture increase, these in¬
creasingly become guessing programs. (This becomes a
branch of artificial intelligence , a misleading term for
a curious field, discussed on p^.' , l2"ty*)

Numerous computer people think it is important to
match up our computer graphic display systems (described
variously on this side of the book) to image input sys¬
tems. This is a matter of taste.

These are all basically techniques for making a
data structure . Any data stored in computers must have,
of course, a data structure— which basically means any
arrangement of information you choose. (see p.26 -< f-)

These various techniques are intended to create re¬
duced data structures, recording only the "most impor¬
tant" data of the picture— from which new and varying
pictures may be created, reflecting the "true" structures
originally shown in the initial picture. How much it's
going to be possible to create these data structures
from Input pictures remains to be seen; some of us think
it’s not going to be generally worthwhile.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Azriel Rosenfeld, "Progress In Picture Processing
1969-71." ACM Computing Surveys June 73,
81-108.

Ken Knowlton and Leon Harmon, "Computer-Produced
Grey Scales." Computer Graphics and Image
Processing . April 72, 1-20.

Philip J. Klass, Secret Sentries in Space . Random,
1971, $8. Interesting general book on geopo¬
litical strategy and orbital photoreconnais¬
sance. "Now-it-can-be-told" approach.

#|T 6 tUT* PICTUK €5 Of
Voor own HORt & 0 MTY,
OR. UHhTf\|ER.

You can get pictures of
any area you want from ERTS
(Earth Resources Observation
Systems) satellites, from
EROS Data Center (no, not a
dating service, see p. ( o*j ),
Sioux Falls SD 57198, or call
605/594-6511 bet. 7 AM & PM
central time.

6TT

LIZZIE OF THE LINEPRINTER

A famous converted picture. The painting
was divided into 100,000 brightness-measured spots
by H. Philip Peterson of Control Data Corporation;
then each dot was made into a square of overprinted
letters on the printing device. The program allow¬
ed 100 levels of grey. Above: Control Data's ver¬
sion, reprinted by permission. Below: a cut-down
version that often turns up. (From original flat
2D artwork by Len DaVinci of Medici Associates.)

NOTE: this is not a "computer picture.'' There
is no such thing. It's a quantization put out on
a lineprinter.

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Kenneth Knowlton is a Bell Labs lifer.

Tall, patrician and gracious, his work, like
Sutherland’s, shows the inner light of unifying
intelligence. He works in Max Mathews' section
of Bell Labs at Murray Hill, where they do all
that interesting stuff with music and perceptual
psychology and so on. During the last decade,
Knowlton has turned out vast quantities of art¬
icles, processed pictures, movies, Bnd actual
computer languages; while any ordinary man
would be satisfied to be so productive, appar¬
ently he does a lot of other things in his work
that he doesn't talk about.

Some of Knowlton's best-known work
hos been in picture processing, where he has
converted photographs into mosaics of tiny
patterns-- which nevertheless show the original.

His first widely-known language was
BEFLIX (BE11 Labs movie-making system); this
was programmed for the 7094 in the early sixties.
BEFLIX allowed the user to create motion pictures
by a clever mosaic process that used the out¬
put camera more efficiently. (Actually . the lens
was thrown out of focus manually and the entire
frame created as a mosaic of alphabetical charac¬
ters; this did the whole thing much more Quickly
and inexpensively.)

(Some of the clever data-handling tech¬
niques of BEFLIX Knowlton then turned around
and used in L6, a language which made these
techniques available to other computer people.

This may sound like only a computer technicality,
but it’s the sort of thing that's widely appreciated.
(L6 stands for "belL Labs' Lower-Level List
Language."))

Wanting to get outside artists interested
in BEFLIX and related media, he worked for a time
with film-maker Stan Vanderbeek; from this
Knowlton saw that artists' needs were more
intricate than he had anticipated. Augmenting
BEFLIX with some of the things Vanderbeek
asked for, Knowlton came up with a new lan¬
guage called TARPS (Two-Dimensional Alpha-
Numeric Raster Picture System). This in turn
led to EXPLOR (Explicit(ly provided 2D Patterns,)
Local (neighborhood) Operations, and Random-'
ness). EXPLOR is fascinating because of its
originality and generality-- not only does it
modify pictures and serve as an artist's tool,
but it has fascinating properties as a computer
language and may even have applications in
complex simulations for technical purposes.

Since Vanderbeek, Knowlton has entered
into a long and fruitful collaboration with Lillian
Schwartz, a talented artist. Their many films
have been clever, startling and powerful. I
must say that they grow on you: I liked them at
first, but when I saw five or six in a row this
January, I found them just incredible. Because
they are abstract, and full of fast-changing
patterns and reversals, they take some adjusting
to; but they’re worth seeing over and over.

EXPLOR may be thought of as a highly
generalized version of Conway’s game of Life
(see p. HS )• Y °u start with two-dimensional
patterns as your data structure; these can be
abstractions or even converted photographs, as
in a recent Knowlton-Schwartz film showing
Muybridge's Running Man. In your EXPLOR
program, you may then cause the pattern to
change by degrees, each cell of the pattern
reacting to the cells around it or to random
events as specified by the programmer.

EXPLOR, running without external data,
comes up with some extraordinary snakeskin and
Jack Frost patterns. But its uses in traffic
simulation and various other studies of popu¬
lations in space could be very interesting.

EXPLOR has obvious artistic applications.
Lillian Schwartz is using it extensively in film-
making. It's now running on a minicomputer
feeding to a modified Sony Trinitron color TV.

(This color setup was created by Mike Noll
and is described in a recent issue of the CACM,
though only for black-and-white TV; the color
is more recent. It stores the color picture as
a list of sequential colors represented in the
computer's core memory, each dot being repre¬
sented Cf. "Boyell's T errarium," p. S h3^ .)

Knowlton has used EXPLOR for teaching
computer art at the University of California;
the language is available programmed in "medium
size" Fortran from Harry Huskey, Dept of
Information and Computer Science, U. of Cal.
at Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, California.

DM 11

This is a non-dimple picture
conversion. The original
photograph was converted into
measured points; but these
were in turn made into grow—
together patterns by a
program in the EXPLOR language.
©Knowlton i Harmon.

SPEECH BY COMPUTER

(1 You “y have heard about various kinds of
talking computer." Thia deserves some explanation.

Computers may be made to "talk" by various
means. One Is through an output device that

simply stores recordings of separate
words or syllables, which the computer selects with
appropriate timing. (Machines of this type have been
sold by both IBM and Cognitronics for a Long time.)

A deeper approach is to have the computer synthe¬
size speech from phonemes, or actually make the tones
and noises of which speech is composed. These are
very tricky matters. Bell Labs, and others, have been
working on many of these approaches.

The real problem, of course, is how to decide
what to say . (This was discussed under Artificial
Intelligence, p. ^ )

AUDIO ANALYSIS AND ENHANCEMENT

The problem of analyzing audio is very like the
problem of analyzing pictures (see p . I 0 ) , and indeed
some of the same techniques are used. The audio goes
into the computer as a stream of measurements, and
the selfsame technique of Fourier Analysis is employed.
This reduces the audio to a series of frequency measure¬
ments over time— but, paradoxically, loses little of
the fidelity.

Once audio is reduced to Fourier patterns, it can
be reconstituted in various ways: changed in timing and
pitch independently, or enhanced by polishing techni¬
ques like those used in image enhancement (see p.$r*pO ).

This has been done with great success by Tom Stock-
ham at the University of Utah, who has reprocessed old
Caruso records into improved fidelity. In the picture
we see him with equipment of some sort and an old record.

Wish there were room to talk about plain
regular audio here— matters like "binaural"
recording, and Why don't they make hi-fi systems
based on a Grand Bus (see pM2 )? But there’s
no room here.

AUDIO AND COMPUTERS

People are occasionally still startled to
hear that computers can make sound and music.

They can indeed.

First of all, note that an incoming sound is
a fluctuating voltage and can thus be turned into
a data structure, i.e., a string of measurements.

In the easiest case, the computer can just
send back out the voltages it originally got in.
This is rather ridiculous— using the computer
just as a recording device— but it’s a clear and
simple example.

The question after that is what next : how to
have the computer make interesting streams^output
measurements, i.e., sounds and tones. "

To make sound by computer is the obverse. If
the computer can be Bet up to send out^ a string of
measurements, these can be turned back into a fluct¬
uating voltage, and thus make sounds.

There are numerous methods we can’t go into.

Max Mathews, at Bell Labs, has for years been doing
music by computer; his current system is called
GROOVE. Heinz von Foerster, at the University of
Illinois (Urbana), has been doing the same. An¬
other lab at MIT has just gotten a PDP-11/45 (see
p. WZ_) f° r the same purpose.

(The problem is: can the computer keep up
with the output rate needed to make music in real
time ? maybe the 11/45 can.)

Another approach is to relieve the computer
itself from making the tones, and use other de¬
vices— music synthesizers— for this, controlled
by the computer. This is essentially the approach
taken with General Turtle's Music Box (see p. ^7 )»
and at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Cen¬
ter, where their RCA Mark XI music synthesizer— an
immense one-of-a-kind jobbie— is under more general
computer control.

MUSICAL NOTATION

note tnat

- computer nanrtllng of musical

notes, as symbols. Is another task entirely.

Closely resembling computer text handling (mention-
e variously in the book). A high-power structur-
ed-text system or Thinkertoy (see p.finRj) i s fine
tor storing and presenting written music.

, -■ scored musical notation

U data structure) can obviously be playe d by
the hookups mentioned. -—

University of Utah

(Stockham has been in the news lately, as one of
the panel puzzling over the notorious 18-Minute Gap.)

(The author has proposed the name Kitchensync tm
for a system to synchronize motion pictures with wild
sound recording by these means.)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Thomas G. Stockham, Jr., "Restoration of Old Acoustic
Recordings by Means of Digital Signal Processing.
Audio Engineering Society preprint no. 831 (D-4),
presented at Audio Engineering Society 1971 con¬
vention .

’rentiss H. Knowlton, "Capture and Display of Keyboard
Music," Datamation May '72, 56-60. Describes a
setup he built at U. of Utah that allows pianists
to play music on an ordinary keyboard, and converts
the input to symbolic representation in the com¬
puter. It uses an organ, a PDP-8 and a couple of
CRT displays.

"^leinz^von Foers ter aflf Jd l bes Beaucha mp, Music bjr Computer*
Wiley, 1969. HAS RECORDS IN BACK.

Some of the early Bell Labs work may be heard on an
excellent Decca LP with the misleading title
"MUSIC from MATHEMATICS." (Decca DL 79103)■ (The
mathematical myth is discussed on p. a- 1 ).)

811

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These are three topics of great importance:
of importance, unfortunately, less for what they
have actually accomplished than for the degree
to which they have confused and intimidated peo¬
ple who want to understand what’s going on.
Merely to mention them can be one-upmanship.

All three titles mean so much, so many different
specific things, as to mean almost nothing when
lumped together as a whole. All three have de¬
veloped a web of intricate technical facts (and
sometimes theorems), but the applicability of
these elegant findings is in all three cases a
matter open to considerable scrutiny.

m CsPD'Buiur\eps /

"Artificial Intelligence" ia at once the sexiest
and moat ominous tens in the world. It chills and Im¬
presses at the same tine. In principle it means the
simulation of processes of mind, by any means at all;
but It generally turns out to be some form or another
of computer simulation (see "Simulation," p. <Tt ) •
Actually, "artificial Intelligence" has generally be¬
come an all-Inclualve term for systems that amaze, as¬
tound, mystify, and do not operate according to prin¬
ciples which can be easily explained. In a vay, "arti¬
ficial Intelligence" is an ever-receding frontier: as
techniques become well-worked out and understood, their
appearance of intelligence, to the sophisticated, con¬
tinually recedes. It's like the ocean: however much
you take out of it, it still stretches on— as limit¬
less as before.

Since each of these fields has developed
a considerable body of technical doctrine, the
reader might well ask: why aren't they on the
other side of the book, the computer side? The
answer is that they are computerman's dreams,
dreams of considerable intricacy and persuas¬
iveness. and we are not considering the tech¬
nicalities here anyway. As on the other side,
the problem is to help you distinguish opples
from oranges and which way is up. For more
go elsewhere, but 1 hope this orientation will
make sorting things out quicker for you.

These three terms-- "artificial intelligence,”
"information retrieval." "computer-assisted
instruction"-- have a number of things in com¬
mon. First, the names are so portentous and
formidable. Second, if you read or hear any¬
thing in these fields, chances are it will have
an air of unfathomable technicality. Both strange
technicalism and deep mathematics may combine
to give you a sense that you can't understand
any of it. This is wrong. The fact that there
are obscure and Deep Teachings in each haB no
bearing on the general comprehensibility of what
they are about. More importantly, the question
of how applicable all the things these people
have been doing is going (o be is a question
of considerable importance, especially when
some of these people want to take something over.
Don't get snowed.

Each of these fascinating terms is actually
a roof over a veritable 200 of different researchers,
often of the most eccentric and interesting sort,
each generally with his own dream of how his
own research will be the breakthrough for
humanity, or for something. It would take a
Lemuel Gulliver to to show you the colorfulness
and fascination of these fields; again, we just
scratch the surface here.

Another interesting thing these three fields
nave in common: the frequent use of a classical
computerman's putdown on anybody who dares
question whether their super-ultimate goals can
ever be achieved.

Unfortunately laymen are so Impressed by computers
in general that they easily suppose computers can do
anything involving information. And public understand¬
ing is not fostered by certain types of stupid demon¬
stration. One year I heard from numerous people about
how "they'd seen on TV about how computers write TV
scripts"— what had actually been shown was a hokey en¬
actment of how the computer could randomly decide whe¬
ther the Bad Man gets shot or the Cood Cuy gets shot—
both outcomes dutifully enacted by guys in cowboy out¬
fits. Duh.

It should be perfectly obvious to anybody who's
brushed even slightly with computers, however— for
The Brush, see the other side— that they just don't
work like minds. But the analogy hangs around. (Ed¬
mund C. Berkeley wrote a book in the forties, I believe,
with the misleading title of Giant Brains , or Machines
That Think . The idea is still around.)

Here's a very simple example, though. Consider
a maze drawn on a piece of paper. Just by looking, we
cannot simultaneously comprehend all its pathways; we
have to poke around on It to figure out the solution.
Computers are aort of like that, but more so. While our
eyes can take in a simple picture, like a square, at
once, the computer program must poke around in its data
representation at length to sec what we saw at once.

The principle holds true In general. The human
mind can do in a flash, all at once (or "in parallel")
many things that must be tediously checked and tried
by the highly sequential computer program. And the
more we know about computers, the more impressive the
human brain becomes. (The seeming cleverness of some
simple programs does not prove the simplicity of the
phenomena being Imitated.)

Nevertheless, It is interesting to try things
with computers that are more like what the mind does;
and that is mostly what artificial Intelligence Is
about.

In various cases this has resulted in helpful (

tricks that turn out to be uaeful elsewhere in the (.

computer field. In this sense, artificial intelligence
is sort of like menthol: a little may improve things J
here and there. But (in my opinion), that does not
mean a whole lot of it would make things better still.

Nevertheless, some artificial-intelligence en¬
thusiasts think there is no limit on what machines can
do. They point out that, after all, the brain is a
machine. But so is the universe, presumably; and
we're never going to build one of those, either.

What It bolls down to la the study of clusa and
guessing among alternatives . In some esses, well-
defined cluea can be found for recognizing epeclflc
thinge, like pert* of pictures (even straight lines
cennot be recognized by computer without a complex
program) or like handwriting (sec below). In the
worse cases, though, earefnl study only raises the
moat horrendous technical problems, and the pursuit
of these technical problems is Its own field of
study (articles have titles like "Sensitivity Pmrs-
meters in the Adjuetment of Discriminatorsmeaning
It Sure le Hard to Draw The Lina).

But in some felicitous cases, researchers ac¬
tually boil a recognition problem down to « manage¬
able system of clues. For Instance, take the prob¬
lem of written input to computers. (Some people
don't like to type and would rather write by hand
on apeclsl input tablete.) But how can a program
recognize the letters? Aha: ths answer, kids, is
in your text.

The Ledeen Character Recognizer (described in
detail in Newman and Sproull, Principles of Inter¬
active Computer Graphics , Appendix 8) is a method
by which a program can look at a hand-drawn charac¬
ter and try to recognize it. The program extract*
a series of "properties" for the character and
stores them in an array. Every character In a given
person's block lettering will tend to have certain
property scores. But the Ledeen recognizer must
still be trained , that is, the average property
scores of the letters that each individual draws
must be put into the system before that individual’s
lettering can be recognized. Even then it's a ques¬
tion of probability, rather than certainty, that
a given character will be recognized.

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HEURISTICS (pronounced hevRIStlcs)

If we want to make a computer do what we know
perfectly well how to do ourselves, then all we do
is write a program.

Aha. But what If we want a computer to do
something we do not know how to do ourselves?

We must set up its program to browse, and search,
and seize on what turns out to work.

This is called heuristics.

What It amounts to basically Is techniques for
trying things out, checking the results, and continu¬
ing to do more and more of what seems to work.

Or we could phrase It this way: looking for
successful strategies in whatever area we're dealing
with. As a heuristic program tries things out, it
keeps various scores of how well it's doing— a sort of
self-congratulation— and makes adjustment* in favor
of what works best.

Thus the Greenblatt Chess Program, mentioned un¬
der "Chesa," nearby, can "invent" chess strategies
and "try them out"— what it actually does is test
specific patterns of moves for the overall goodness
of their results (in terms of the usual positional
advantages In chess), and discard the strategies that
don't get anywhere. It does this by comparing its
"strategies" (possible move patterns) against the
record's of cheas matches which are fed into it.

ill

The line is, "WE DON'T KNOW HOW TO DO
THAT YET."

If somebody pulls it on you, the reply is
simply, "How do you know you ever will?"

Oieofttie^Gcoj)

ccwTeit jokes

illustrating also certain problems of Artificial
Intelligence.

A very large artificial-intelligence system
(goes the story) had been built for the military
to help in long-range policy planning; financed
by ARPA, with people from M.I.T., Stanford
and so on.

"The system ia now ready to answer ques¬
tions," a aid the spokesman for the project.

A four-star general bit off the end of a
cigar, looked whimsically at his comrades and
said—

"Aak the machine this: Will it be Peace
or War?"

The clerk-typist (Sp4) translated this
into the query language and typed it in.

The machine replied:

YES

"Yes what? " bellowed the general.

The operator typed in the query.

Came the anawer:

PATTERN RECOGNITION

This Is one of the most active areas In arti¬
ficial intelligence, perhaps because of Defense
Department money. (It might be nice, goes the
reasoning, to have guns that could recognize tanks,
machines that could look over aerial reconnaissance
pictures, radars that could recognize missiles...)

(If you’ve read the other side of the book,
heuristics may be thought of as a form of operations
research (p. S'? ) carried on by the computer Itself.)

In some vaya heuristics is the most magical area
of artificial intelligence: its results are the moat
impressive to laymen. But, like so many of the comput¬
er magics, it boils down to technicalities which lose
the romance to a certain extent.

Yes SIR

DM 13

neural simulation

An Important branch of Artificial Intelligence 1*
concerned with whet bunches of laaglnary neuron* could
do. even neuron* that we aade up to follow particular
rule*. This are* of study la soaevhsre between neurol¬
ogy and aatheaatlea: much of It Is concerned with the
aatheaatlea of Imaginary setups, rather than the proper¬
ties of actual nerve-neta, *■ studied by psychologist*,
physiologists and other*. (The hypothetical studies,
of course, elert researchers to complex configurations
and possibilities that may turn out to occur In reality,
as well as being interesting for their own sake— and
conceivably aa ueeful waya ol organising thlnga to be
built.)

However, an aarlter myth, that you could simulate
neurons till you got s person, 1* about dssd.

SIMULATION OF THOUGHT-PROCESSES

Nobody talka anymore about simulating artificial
brains; there’s too much to it, and it involve* dirty

approximation.

However, a cleaner area Is In the simulation of
thought: cresting computer programs that mimic man’s
mental processes as he dopes through various problems.
Trying things out, deducing thoughts from what's al¬
ready known, following through the consequences of
guesses— these can all be done by programs that “try
to figure out" answer* to problems like The Cannibal
and The Missionary, or whatever.

AUTOMATA

"Automata'',' a* the tern la used in thin field,
la just a fancy word for imaginary critters , parti¬
cularly little thingiea that behave In exact waya.

(The Came of Life, see p. f 8, is an automaton In
this sense.)

SELF-ORGANIZING SYSTEMS, SELF-REPRODUCING SYSTEMS,

AND SO PORTH

These are terms for Imaginary objects, having
exactly defined mathematical properties, about which
various abstract things can be proven that tend to be
of interest only to mathematicians.

SPEECH

1. SENTENCE GENERATION

The problem of computers speaking human languages—
not to be confused with computer languages, pp. 15-25 and
elsewhere— is incredibly explicated. Just because little
human tykes start doing It effortlessly. It Is easy to sup¬
pose that It's a basically easy problem.

No way.

Only since the mid-fifties has human language begun
to be understood. That was when Noam Chomsky discovered the
inner structure of human languages: namely, that the long
(and complex) sentence constructions of language are built
out of certain exact operations. Previous linguist* had
sought to classify the sentence structures themselves; this
led to complexities which Chomsky discovered were unneces¬
sary. It is unnecessary to catalog sentence types them¬
selves if we can simply Isolate, Instead, the exact process¬
es by which they are generated.

These processes he called transformations (a term he
borrowed from mathematics). All utterances are created from
certain elementary pieces, called kernels , which are then
chewed by transformations into surface structures . the
final utterances. Examples of kernels: The man lives in the
house, The house is white. Result of combining transforma¬
tion: The man lives in the white house. Kernel: 1 go.

Result of past-tense transformation: I went.

The moat important finding, now, is that the transfor¬
mations are carried out in orderly sequences : any sentences
can have more transformations carried out on it, all adher¬
ing to the basic rules, resulting in the most complex sen¬
tences of any language.

Linguists since then have confirmed Chomsky's con¬
jecture, and proceeded to work out the fundamental trans¬
formations of major languages, including English.

Now, one result of all this ia that it tuma out to
be easier to generate sentences in a language than to un¬
derstand them. Why? Because it is comparatively easy to
program computers to apply transformations to kernels,

BUT very hard to take apart the result. A complex "sur¬
face structure" may have numerous possible kernels— does
"Time flies like an arrow" have the same structure as
"Susie sings like s bird" or "Fruit files like an orange?"

Result: to program a computer to generate speech—
that ia, invent sentences about a data structure and type
them out— is comparatively easy, but to have it recognize
incoming sentences, and break them up into their kernel
meanings, la not.

We may think of a language-generating computer aya-
tem as follows:

rew-

roK-

Ti l

vciut gj

SENTENCE RECOGNITION

Chomsky and others have discovered that seta of trans¬
formation rules (or gtamarg . praise be) very considerably.
It is possible to invent languages whose surface structures
are easy to take apart, or parse : auch languages are called
context-free languages . (Most computer languages, see other
side, are of this type.) Unfortunately natursl languages,
like English and French and Navaho, are not context-free.

It turns out that the human brain can pick apart language
structuree because it's eo good at making sensible guesses
as to what it meant— and If there ie one thing hard to
program for computers, it is sensible guessing.
(But see "Heuristics," nearby.)

This means that to create computer systems which will
take real sentence* spart into their mesninge Is quite
difficult. We can't get into the various strategies here;
but moat researchers cut the problem down in one way or
other.

wo,d '

“ ^’^esponsjvc

I Fitted wuh our Specie! n i 7, ^ A N

' Thlnks ' S F“*». Acts, and iZa T Att * chm,n ’

z m a

f o

«I don't know,” answered Dorothy, who had
more to read. “Listen to this, Billina:”

DIRECTIONS FOR USING:

For THINKINGWind the Clock-work Man under his
left arm. (marked No. 1.)

For SPEAKING:—Wind the Clock-work Man under his
right arm, (marked No. 2.)

For WALKING and ACTION Wind Clock-work in the
middle of his back, (marked No. 3.)

K IV-ThM ■» 10 «o»k pmrUellj far « Ihcniund ywt.

“Well, I declare!” gasped the yellow hen, in
amazement; “if the copper man can do half of these
things he is a very wonderful machine. But I suppose
it isall humbug, like so many other patented articles."

“We might wind him up,” suggested Dorothy,
“and see what he'll do.”

GORDON PASiI

Gordon Pask is one of the maddest mad
scientists I have ever met, and also one of
the nicest. An eloquent English leprechaun
who dresses the Edwardian dandy, Pask sows
awe wherever he goes. A former doctor and
theatrical producer, Pask is one of the great
international fast-talkers, conference-hopping
round the globe from Utah to Washington to
his project at the Brooklyn Children's Museum.
This spring, 1974, he has been at the Univer¬
sity of Illinois at Chicago Circle, but soon
he goes back to England and his laboratory.

In a field full of brilliant eccentrics,
Pask has no difficulty standing out.

Pask is one of the Artificial Intelli¬
gencers who is working on teaching by compu¬
ter, about which more will be said; but the
original core of his interest is perhaps the
process of conceptualization and abstraction.

Pask has done a good deal on the mathe¬
matics of self-contemplating systems, that is,
symbolic representations of what it means for
a creature (or entity omega ) to look at things,
see that they are alike, and divine abstract
conceptions of them. A crowning moment is
when Omega beholds itself and recognizes the
continuity and selfhood. (Pask says several
others-- scholars from Argentina, Russia and
elsewhere-- have hit on the same formulation.)

Models and abstraction, then, are what we
may call the first half of Pask's work.

Gordon Paak uill be continued on p. iM7-

3. SPEECH OUTPUT AS SOUND

It it possible in principle to sat up computers to
"talk" by converting ths language surface structures that
their program corn up with Into actual sound. See
"Audio," p. DH IA.

4. SPEECH INPUT TO COMPUTERS BY ACTUAL SOUND

So far we hava baen talking about ths computer's aanl-
pulatlon of language aa an alphabetical coding or similar
repreaentatlon. To actually talk at a computer 1a another
kettle of flah. Thle means breaking down the aound Into
phonenea and then breaking it into a data atructurc which
can be treated with the rulee of gramar— a whole nothar
difficult step.

A few attempts have been mad# to market dsvlcea which
would recognize Halted speech and convert It to symbol■ to
go Into the computer. One of thea, which supposedly can
distinguish among thirty or forty different spoken words,
la supposedly atlll on the aarket. Specific users hava to
"train" It to the particulars of their voices.

I repeatedly hear rumors of "dictation Machines" which
will type what you say to them. If auch things exist I have
been unable to confirm It.

(Everybody says that of course what we vent la to be
able to cooBunlcate with coaputers by speech. Speaking
personally, I certainly don't. Explaining my punctuation
to human secretaries la hard enough, let alone trying to
tell It to a coisputer, when It's easy enough to type It in.)

5. - ALL TOGETHER NOW

The complexity of the problem should by now be clear.

"nifcrtf<r

CYBERNETICS

Gordon Pask calls his field Cybernetics.

The term "cybernetics" is heard a lot, and is
one of those terms which, in the main, mankind
would be better off without; although after
talking to Pask I get the sense that there may
be something to it after all.

The term "cybernetics" was coined by Nor-
bert Wiener, the famously absent-minded math¬
ematician who (according to legend) often
failed to recognize his own children.' Wiener
did pioneering work in a number of areas. A
special concern of his was the study of things
which are kept in control by corrective meas¬
ures, or, as he called it. Feedback . The term
"cybernetics" he made out of a Greek word
for steersman , applying it to all processes
which involve corrective control. It turns
out that almost everything involves corrective
control, so the term "cybernetics" spreads out
as far and as thinly as you could possibly want
(The public is under the general impression
that "cybernetics" refers to computers, and
the computer people should be called "cyber¬
neticians." There seems to be nothing that
can be done about this. See "cybercrud
p. g . This is an even worse term meaning
"steering people into crud," specifically,
putting things over on people using computers.)

Properly, the core of "cybernetics ' seems
to deal with control linkages , whether in
automobiles, cockroaches or computers. How¬
ever, people like Pask, von Foerster, Ashby
(and so on) appear to extend the concept gen¬
erally to the study of forms of behavior and
adaptation considered in the abstract. The
validity and fascination of this work, of
course, is quite unrelated to what you call it.

THE TURING MACHINE

Is the most classical abstract Automaton.

A Turing Machine, named after Us discoverer,
is a hypothetical device which has an lnfin~
Ite recording tape that It can move back and
forth, and the ability to make decisions de¬
pending on what's written there.

Turing proceeded to point out that no
matter how fast you go step-by-step, you can t
ever outrun certain restrictions built Into
all sequential processes as represented by
the Turing Machine. This lays heavy limits
on what can ever be done step-by-step by
computer. (It means we have to look for

911

CAM A COMPUTER PLAY CHESS?

THE THREE LAWS OF RO 8 OTTC 8

DO WE MAST TALKtMC SYSTEMS?

I had one quite Irritating experience with a
"convereetlonal 1 system, that le. computer program
that was euppoeed to talk back to we. I waa aup-
poeed to type to It In English and It waa supposedly
going to type back to me In English. I found the ex¬
perience thoroughly Irritating. My side of the con-
yereatlon, which 1 sincerely tried to keep simple,
produced repeated apologise and confusion from the
program. The guy who’d created the program kept ex¬
plaining that the program would be improved, so
that eventually It could handle responses like mine.

My reset Ion wee, end Is, Who needs It?

Many people In the computer field seem to think
we went to be eble to talk to computer* and have them
talk back to ue. Thle la by oo means a settled matter.

Talking programs are complicated and require »
lot of space in the machine, and (more importantly)
require a lot of time by progrsmer. who could achieve
(1 think) more in leas tlms by other means. Moreover,
talking programs produce an Irritating strategical
paradox. In dealing with human beings, we know what
we're dealing with, and can adjust what we say accord¬
ingly; there la no waj to tell , except by a lot of ex¬
perimenting, what the principles are Inside a particu¬
lar talking program; so that trying to adjust to It
la a strain and an Irritation. (Compare; talking to a
stranger who may or -ay not turn out to be your new boas.)
Now, some ptogramer* keep saying that eventually they 11
have it acting Juat as smart as a real person, so we needn’t
adjust; but that'* ridlculoua. We alw«y* adju*t to real
people. In other words, the human discomfort and Irrita¬
tion Of p»ychlng the system gut can never be eliminated.

Furthermore, on today's sequential equipment and
with feasible budgets, I personally think ths likelihood
of making programs that are really general talkers 1* a
foolish goal. There are many simpler ways of telling
computer systems what you want to tell them— light pen
choice, for example.

Moreover, having to type in whole English phraaes
can be Irritating. (We can't even get into the problem
of having the computer pick epart the audio If you talk
it In.)

This la not to say understandably re»trlcted talking
systems are bad. If you know and understand the sorts of
response the system makes to what kinds of thing, then an
Engllah-Uke response 1* really a clear message. For in¬
stance, the JOSS syatem (the first Quickie language-
see p. IS) had an eloquent message;

eh?

which actually meant. What you have Juet typed In doea not
fit the rules of acceptable Input for this system . But It
waa short, It was quick, it was simple, and It was almost
polite.

Similarly, talking systems that uaa an exact vocabu¬
lary, whose limits and abilities sre known to the person,
arc okay. (Wlnograd, see Bibliography, has a nice example
of telling a computer to stack blocks, where the system
knows words like between, on, above and so on.) Where
this is understood by the human, It can be a genuine con¬
venience rather than a spurious one.

(The problem of rudeness in computer dialogue has not
been much discussed. This is partly because many program¬
mers are not fully aware of it, or. Indeed, some are so
skilled in certain subtle forms of rudeness they wouldn't
even know they weren't acceptable. The result is that cer¬
tain types of putdown, poke, peremptoriness and lmportunacy
can find their way Into computer dialogue all too easily.
Or, to put it another way: nobody like to be talked back to.
Cf. Those stupid green THANK YOU lights on automatic toll
booths.)

Now, this Is not to aay that research in these areas
Is wrong, or even that researchers' hopes of some break¬
through In talking-systems Is misguided. I am saying,
basically, that talking systems cannot be taken for grant¬
ed aa the proper goal In computer# to be uaed by people;
that the problems of rudeness, and Irritating the human
user, arc far greater than many of these researchers sup¬
pose; and that there may be alternatives to thia potential¬
ly eternal leprechaun-chasing.

If like the author you are bemused by the great
difficulty of getting along with human beings, then the
creation of extraneous beings of impenetrable character
with vaguely human qualities can only alarm you, and
the prospect of these additional crypto-entitlea which
** 8t be fended and placated, clawing at ue from their
niches at every turn. Is both distasteful and alarming.

Artificial Intelligence enthusiasts unfortunately
tend to have a magician's outlook: to make clear how
their things work would spoil the show.

Thus, for a rather peculiar art show held at New
York's Jewish Museum in 1970, a group from MIT built a
large device that stacked blocks under control of a
minicomputer (Interdata brand). Now. the fact that it
could stack and re-stack blocks with just a minicomputer
was really quite an aeccupiiahment, but this was not
explained.

instead, the block-stacking mechanism was enclosed
in a large glass pen, in which numerous gerbils— hoppy
little rodents— were free to wander about. When a ger-
bil saw that a block was about to be stacked on him, he
would sensibly move.

Now, it is fairly humorous, and not cruel, to put
gerbils into a block-stacking machine. But this was
offered to the public as a device partaking of a far more
global mission, the experimental interaction of living
creatures and a dynamic self-improving environment,
blah blah blah.

Passersby were awed. 'Why are those animals in
there?" one would say, and the more informed one would
usually say, "It's some kind of scientific experiment."

Well, this is e twilight area, between science and
whimsical hokum, but one cannot help wishing simple and
humorous things could be presented with their simplicity
and humor laid bare.

I remember watching one gerbil who stood motionless
on hie little kangaroo matchetick legs, watching the Great
Grappler rearranging his world. Gerbils are somewhat in¬
scrutable, but I had a sense that he was worshiping it.

He did not move until the block started coming down on top

I take this as an allegory.

2IT

The reel question is, can s aet of procedures
play chess? Because that's what the computer pro¬
gram really doea, enact a aet of procedures.

1-- A robot may not injure a human being, or,
through inaction, allow a humsn being to come
to harm.

And ths answer Is yea, fairly well.

Now, a chess program Is not something you Jot
down on the back of an envelope one afternoon. It's
usually an lmense, convoluted thing that people have
worked on for yeara. (Although I vaguely recall that
second place In the 1970 Inter-computer chess contest
was won by a program that occupied only 2000 locations
In a 16-blt minicomputer— In other words, a compact
and tricky sneaker.)

Now, simple games (liks tlc-tac-toe and Nln and
even Cubic) can be worked out all the way: all alter¬
natives can be examined by the program and the beat
one found. Not so with chess.

Chets basically Involves, because of Its very
many possibilities, a "combinatorial explosion" of
alternatives (see p. HJ); that is, to look at "all"
the possibilities of a midgame would take forever
(perhaps literally— the Turing problem), and thus
means must be found for discarding tome possibilities.

1-- A robot must obey the orders given it by
humsn beings except where such orders would
conflict with the First Law.

3- A robot must protset Its own existence as
long as such protection does not conflict with
the First or Second Law.

- Handbook of Robotics .

56th Edition, 2058 A.D.,
quoted in I. Asimov, 1. Robot .

.S rr ,1qi. ( Ta,K

wilt see vou

(What the ELIZA program types, we represent as all caps:
what the person types la not.)

The structure of branching poaslbllltiea la a
tree (sea p. 2 £> > l 80 that method* of "pruning" the
tree turn out to be crucial.

Baaically there are two approachea to the design
of cheas programs. In one approach, the programmers
look for specific threats and opportunities In the
data structure representing the board, and try to find
good atrategles for selecting good moves on the basis
of then. This Is the approach taken In COKO, the
"Cooper-Kor"chess program. The programmers selectively
cope with individual problems and strategies as they
turn out to be necessary. (This means that It Is
likely to have specific Achilles’ heels; which, of
course, the authors of the program keep trying to re¬
pair by adding specific corrections.)

A different approach is taken by the Creenblatt
cheas program. This la basically a big Heuristic prog¬
ram. It "learns" best atrategles In chess by "watching"
the game. That Is, your pour historical cheas matches
through It, and It tries out strategies— making various
tentative rules about what kinds of moves are good, then
scoring these moves according to the results of malting
them— aa seen in positional advantages Chat resulted In
actuelly championship play.

Obviously thle is s field In Itself. You won't get
grants for It, but to those who really care about both
chess and computers. It's the only thing to be doing.

FRANKENSTEIN MEETS CYBERCRUD

Fred Brooks, the keynote speaker at the IEEE com¬
puter conference in Fall 74, seem* to have said that
HAL 9000 (the unctuous, traitorous Presence in the
movie 2001 ) was the way computers should be. ( Computer
Decisions . Apr 74, 4.)

PLEASE TELL HE YOUR PROBLEM.

1 am feeling depressed.

HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN FEELING DEPRESSED?

Ever since ay mother left.

TELL ME MORE ABOUT YOUR FAMILY.

My father is very strict.

PLEASE GO ON.

Last night I dreamt he spanked me.

WHAT WOULD IT MEAN TO YOU IF HE SPANKED YOU?

Didn't yod ever get epanked?

WE WERE DISCUSSING YOU, NOT ME.

You're Juat a dumb machine anyway.

DO COMPUTERS FRIGHTEN YOU?

(quoted in Wlnograd, 74-5)

The fascinating thing about the ELIZA program 1*
that it seems so like a real person— that is, a psycho¬
analyst of the nondirective, Carl Rogers school.

But all it is is a bag of tricks.

It ha* a lot of canned phraaes it can throw out,
like PLEASE TELL ME YOUR PROBLEM.

Then it spots certain types of sentences and turns
them around. If the person types a sentence beginning with
"I am...", the ELIZA program turns it around with HOW LONG
HAVE YOUR BEEN. . . ?

And it looks for specific words which indicate a sen¬
tence can be turned around for a convincing result. For in¬
stance, if the person uses the word "everyone," the program
simply replies, WHO IN PARTICULAR CAN YOU THINK OF?

And certain highly-charged words are signals to throw in
a singer, regardless of what the user may have said. Por in¬
stance, If the person uses the word "mother," the machine
replies:

I find it hard to believe that anybody could think
that. Nevertheless, there are those artificial-intelli¬
gence freaks whose view it is that the purpose of all
this Is eventually (a) to create servants that will read
our minds and do our bidding, (b) servants who will take
things over and will Implement human morality, regardless
of our bidding (though we humans are tex frail to do so—
as in Asimov's I, Robot); or even (c) create masters who
will take everything over and run everything according to
their own principles and the hell with us. (I met a man
In s bar, after an ACM meeting, who claimed to believe
this was the purpose of It all: to create the master race
that would replace ua.)

TELL ME ABOUT YOUR FAMILY.

Now, do not be fooled. There ie no Ghost In the
Machine. The program does not "understand" the user.

THE PROGRAM IS MERELY ACTING OUT THE BAG OF TRICKS THAT
JOE WEIZENHAUH THOUGHT UP. Credit where credit Is due:
not to The Computer's Omniscience, but to Weizenbaum's
cleverness.

(Look at ths above sample dialogue and see if you
guess what tricks the program was using.)

The thing is, many people refuse to believe that It's
a program. Even when the program's tricks are explained.

According to Arthur C. Clarke's retroactive novel
2001: A Space Odyssey (Signet, 1968, 95f). the HAL 9000
computer series began as follows:

"In the 1980s, Minsky and Good had shown how neural
networks could be generated automatically-- self-
replicated-- in accordance with any arbitrary
learning pattern. Artificial brains could be grown
by a process strikingly analogous to the development
of the human brain." (P, 96.)

I don't know who Good is, but these are among the lines
Minsky has been working along for years, so I hope he’s
encouraged by the news of what he's going to accomplish.

Possible answer *1. It is rumored that Clarke's
retro-novel was Clarke 1 * rebuttal to Kubrick's final film,

And even some who underatand ELIZA like to call it up
from their terminal* for companionship, now and then.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Terry Wlnograd, "When Will Computers Understand People?"
Psychology Today May 74, 73-9.

(Weizenbaum'i full article on ELIZA appeared in the

Comaninicationa of the ACM aometime in the mid or
late sixties: a flowchart revealed ita major trick*.

I have strong hunches about the inner work¬
ings of rnen who get millions of dollars from the
Department of Defense and then soy in private
that really they're going to use it to create a
machine so intelligent it can play with their chil¬
dren. (Not to name names or anything.) An
obvious question is. do they play with their
children? No, they play with computers.

Anyhow, so okay they grow the UAL 9000 in a tank.

Then how come in the Death-of-Hal scene we see Keir Dullea
bobbing around loosening circuit cards, just as if it
were a plain old 1978 computer?

Possible answer »2. HAL's tanks of neural glop are
controlled by PDP-lls, one to a card.

(Of course, if you take the letters after H, A and L
in the alphabet, you get I, B and M. So maybe those are 1130s.)

But the point here is not to hassle the
dreamers, just to sort out the dreams and put
them on hangers so you can try them on, and
maybe choose an ensemble for yourself.

DEUS EX MACHINA

Obviously such beliefs are outside the realm of
jclence or engineering. They belong to pure speculation;
and while various mechanisms have in fact been programed
to croak, stagger, stack blocks, compose sentences and so
on, to suppose that we are in any real sense anywhere near
mimicking human Intelligence, let alone surpassing and
superseding It, is either to be totally fooled or to hanker
after some curious dream from inside yourself.

As we said on the other side of the book, everybody in
computers has deeper motivations and Interior twists that
form his own special ties to these machines; and when It
cornea to our choices of fantasy machines, obviously an even
deeper level of psychic imprint la projecting Itself into
the world.

.. .EX MENS A

People who fantasize about wondrous creatures and deities they
want to make out of the computer obviously have something in¬
teresting in their own heads from which that comes. Perhaps
it comes from a desire for imaginary playmates, or an ambi¬
valence toward authority, or goodness knows what; there are so
many odd people at different ends of Artificial Intelligence
that there may be a lot of different psychological systems
at work. Or maybe artificial intelligence is Just where the
■ost brilliant, determined and eccentric dreamers go. Anyway,
1 can only ask the cueation, not give the answer.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Terry Wlnograd, "When Will Computers Understand People?"
Psychology Today May 74, 73-79.

Particularly readable article.

Nicholas Negroponte, The Architecture Machine . MIT Press.
Takes the view that computera ahould be made into
magical servant# which not only handle bothersome
details, but more or less read our minds as well.
Leonard Uhr, Pattern Recognition , Learning and Thought ;
Computer-Programed Models ot Higher Mental Pro-
esses. Prentice-Hall.

Arthur W. Holt, "Algorithm for a Low Cost Hand Print
Reader." Computer Design Feb 74, 85-89,

Edward A. Felgenbaum and Julian Feldman (eda.),

Computers and Thought . McCraw-Hlll.

Old but still good for orientation.

A journal: Artificial Intelligence (North-Holland

Publishing Co., Journal Division; P.0. Box 211,
Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Was $26.50 s year in 1973.
This’ll show you what they’re thinking about now.

Roger Lind, "The Robots Are Coming, The Robots Are
Coming." Oul . Feb 1974.

Typical layman's hype. You don't get told until the
second page that a typical Industrial "robot" Is a
huge mechanism with one grappling arm.

Edward W. Kozdrowicki and Dennis W. Cooper, "COKO III:

the Cooper-Koz Chess Program." CACM July 73, 411-427.
Creenblatt, R.D., Eaetlake, D.E., and Crocker, S.D., "The
Creenblatt Chess Program." Proc FJCC 67, 801-810.

R.C. Garni11, "An Examination of Tlc-Tac-Toe-like Games."
Proc. NCC 74. 349-355.

t *wr

Mml ecretevML

"Infontition Retrieval" ia one of thoae terms
that laymen throw around aa If It were a manhole
cover. It aounda aa though It means bo much, ao very-
much. And ao you actually hear people aay thlnga like!
"But that would mean... (pregnant pauae) ... Informa¬
tion Retrieval!.'!" Similarly, aome of the hokey new
copyright notlcea you eee In booke from With-It publlah-
era intone that aald books may not be "placet in any In¬
formation retrieval system..." I take this to mean
that the publlahere are forbidding you to put the book
on a bookshelf, because "Information retrieval" almply
means any way at all of getting back information from
anything. A bookehelf, alnce it allowa you to read the
splnea of the booke, la indeed an Information Retrieval
Syatem.

It happena, incidentally, that the phrase "informa¬
tion retrieval" was coined in the forties by Calvin Mooers,
Inventor of TRACt" Language (see pp. 18-21). (If Wiener
had coined it he might have called it Getback. If Diebold
had coined It It might have been Thoughtomation.)

Anyhow, numeroua entirely different thlngB go on in
the field, all under the name of Information Retrieval.

1. Mon-computer retrieval . (See Becker and Hayes,
Automatic Information Retrieval .) These things are kind
of old-fashioned fun— cards with holes punched along the
edge, for instance,that you sort with knitting needles,
or the more recent systems with holes drilled In plastic
cards. Trouble is, of course, that computers are becoming
much more convenient and even less expensive than these,
counting your own time as being worth something.

2. Document Retrieval . Thla basically is an approach
that glorifies the old library card file, except now the
stuff la stored In computer* rather than on cards. But
what's stored is still the name of the document, who wrote
It, where It was published and so on. Obviously helpful

to librarians, but scarcely exciting.

3. Automatic document Indexing. Some organizations
find It helpful to have a computer try to figure out what
a book Is about, rather than have a person look at It and
check. (I don't see why this eaves anything, but there you
are.) Anyway, the text of the document (or selected perts)
are poured through a computer program that selects, for in¬
stance, keywords , that is, the most Important words In It,
or rather words the program thinks are most important. Then
theae keywords can go on the headings of library file cards,
or whatever.

There are various related systems by which people
study, for Instance, the citations between articles, but
we won't get Into that.

4. Content retrieval . Mow we’re getting to the sexy
atuff. A system for content retrieval is one thst somehow
stores Information in a computer and lets you get It back

The trick on both counts Is of course how.

Well, as we said on the other side of the book, any
Information stored in a computer has a data structure ,
which simply means whatever arrangement of alphabetical
characters, numbers and special codes the computer happens
to be saving.

In a content-retrieval system. Information on some
subject is somehow jaimed into a data structure— possibly
even by human coders— and then set up so people can get
It back out again In some way . Lot of possibilities here,
get it?

V ' ' ' ’

In the most startling of these systems, the QAS, or
"QuestIon-Answering System," some sort of dialogue program
(see "Artificial Intelligence," nearby) tries to give you
answers about the data structure. But this means there
have to be a whole lot of programs:

Theae eyatems can be quite startling In the way
they seem to understand you (aee Licklider book; also
Winograd piece under Artificial Intelligence). But they
don_t understand you. They are just poor dumb programs.

Many people (Including Licklider) seem to see in
.Questlon-Anawerlng-System* the wave of the future.
Others, HR* this author, are skeptical. It'a one thlni
u ° t !?““ th * t can deduce that Green's House la

til * “ OUa * fro " a bunch of ln P“t sentences on

the subject, but the question of how much theae can be
Improved la In some doubt. A eyetem that can answer thi
question, Vhat did Hegel say about determinism?" is
Some ways away, to put it mildly.

Then there Is the matter of consistency. The really
Interesting subjects are the ones where different authors
clslm opposing facts to support opposite conclusions.

In other words, there Is inconsistency within the content
of the field. In this case such systems are going to have
a problem. (See "Rasho-Mon Principle" under "Tissue of
Thought," 1

Another fundamental point Is this. It may be easy
enough to program a system to answer the question,

MsrwcnMl

Like Artificial Intelligence and Information Ret¬
rieval, Computer-Assisted Instruction sound* Ilk* some¬
thing exact snd impressive but Is In fsct a scattering of
technique, tied together only nominally by a general Ides.

Teaching. That would immediately allow you to aek, should
computer teaching uee dialogues? But they don't want‘you
to aek that.

In the claeelc formulation of the ssrly sixties, there
were going to be three levels of CAT: "drill-and-prectlce"
systems, much like teaching machines, thst simply helped
students practice various skills; a middle level (often
Itself called, confusingly, "computer-assisted instruction")}
and a third level, the Socratlc system, which would supposedly
be Ideal. Students studying on Socratlc systems would be
eloquently end thoughtfully Instructed and corrected by a
perfect being in the machine. "We don't know how to do that
yet," the people keep eaylng. Yet, indeed.

(My personal view on this subject, expressed In an article
(following) is that Computer-Assisted Instruction in many
way* extendo the worst features of education as we now know it
Into the new realm of presentation by computer.)

J)ots Trte Nfme paviov

This Is a true story. (The details are approx¬
imate.) It may provide certain insights.

An Assistant Commissioner of Education was
being shown a CAI system by representatives of a
large and well-known computer company.

One one side of the Commissioner stood a sales¬
man, who wanted him to be impressed. On the other
side stood one Dr. S., who knew how the system
worked.

The terminal, demonstrating a history program
that had hurriedly been put together, typed: WHO
CAPTURED FORT TICONOEROGA?

WHAT TIME DOES THE NEXT PLANE LEAVE FOR LACUARDIA?

but it Is a lot simpler to^diaplay schedules your eye can
run down, or allow you to go look at aome kind of graphic
display.

"Can I type anything?" asked the Assistant
Conmissioner.

"Sure," said the salesman, ignoring the frantic
head-shaking of Dr. S.

Speaking personally, I don't like talking to machines
and 1 don't like their talking back to me. I'm not saying
you have to agree, I'm just telling you you're allowed to
feel chat way.

5. Screen smmarle* . Theae systems let you sit at
a computer display screen and read summaries of various
things, as well as run through them with various programs
to look for keywords. (The New York Times now offers such
a system, costing over a thousand dollars a month to sub¬
scribers.)

The Assistant Commissioner typed: Gypsy Rose

Lee.

The machine replied:

NO, BUT YOU'RE CLOSE. HE CAPTURED QUEBEC A
SHORT TIHE LATER.

The Assistant Commissioner evidently enlivened
many a luncheon with that one, and Computer-Assisted
Instruction was effectively dead for the rest of the
admin 1stration.

6. " Full-text systems ." These are systems that
one way or another allow you to read all the text of
something from a computer display screen. There are
those of us who see these as the wave of the future,
but many others are perfectly outraged at the thought.
( Hypertext systems, now, are setups that allow you to
read Interconnected texts from computer display screens.
See PP>T/-7.;

This has been brief and has skipped a lot. Anyway,
as you see,IR Is no one thing.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think." Atlantic Monthly .

July 1945, 101-108.

Theodor H. Nelson, "As We Will Think." Proc. Online 72
Conference, Brunei U. Uxbridge, England.

G. Salton, "Recent Studies In Automatic Text Analysis
and Document Retrieval." JACM, Apr 73, 258-278.
Donald E. Walker (ed.), Interactive Bibliographic Search :

The User/Computer Interface . AFIPS Press, $15.
Theodor H. Nelson, "Getting It Out of Our System." In
Schechter (ed.). Critique of Information Retrieval
(Thompson Books, 1947).

J.C.R. Licklider, Libraries of the Future . MIT Press,

1965. Clear and readable summary of the rest of the
field; then he goes on to advocate "procognitlve
systems," systems that will digest what's known In
any field and talk back to you, using techniques
of artificial Intelligence.

Whatever Its other merits, this book Is great
for shaking people up, especially librarians. It
seems so official.

Richard M. Laska, "All the Neva That's Fit to Retrieve."
Computer Decisions . Aug 72, pp. 18-22.

x. " Foil dAv

5MU.T (wiliMuta)

Text- i.

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ft*. ofev " ?)

ANOTHER ANECDOTE

It Is a truism that Mendel's theories of
genetics got "lost" after publication in
1865, to be rediscovered in 1900. "If
only there had been proper information
retrieval under the right categories,"
people often say. Recent studies indi¬
cate that the publication containing
Mendel's paper reached, or got nearly to,
"practically all prominent biologists of
the mid-nineteenth century." ( Scientific
American , July 68, 55.)

i take this as suggesting that the prob¬
lem isn't categorical retrieval at ail.
It's mu 111-connected availability (see
"hypertext,"

Socoe of us have been saying for a long time
that learning from computers ought to be
under control of the student.

One group (never mind who) has taken hold
of this idea and gotten a lot of funding
for it under the name of STUDENT CONTROL.
This group talks as if it were some kind of
scientific breakthrough.

A friend of mine suggests, however, thst
this phrase may have brought the funding
because administrators thought it meant
control o£ the student.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

George B. Leonard, Education and Ecstasy .
Dell, $2.25. Argues for making
education an enthusiastic process,
Theodor H. Nelson, "No More Teachers'
Dirty Looks." Follows.

kit

(The following article appeared in the September. 1970 issue of Computer Decisio ns,
and got an extraordinary amount of attention. I have changed my views somewhat —
we all go through changes, after all-- but after consideration have decided to re-run
it in the original form, without qualifications, mollifications or anything, for its unity.
Thanks to Computer Deci sions for use of the artwork by Gans and for the Superstudent
picture on the cover, whose artist unfortunately insists on preserving his anonymity.

by Theodor H. Nelson

The Nelson Organization
New York

Did you find school dismal and dreary?

Did it turn you off?

Here the author proposes safe and legal
ways to turn kids on.

Some think the educational system is basically
all right, and more resources would get it working
again. Schools would do things the same way. ex¬
cept more so, and things would get better.

In that case the obvious question would be. how
can computers help? How can computers usefully
supplement and extend the traditional and accept¬
ed forms of teaching? This is the question to which
present-day efforts in “computer-assisted instruc¬
tion” — called CAI — seem to respond.

But such an approach is of no possible interest
to the new generation of critics of our school sys¬
tem — people like John Holt (Why Children Fail ),
Jonathan Kozol {Death at an Early Age) and
James Herndon (The Way It Spozed To Be). More

and more, such people are severely questioning the
genera! framework and structure of the way we
teach.

These writers describe particularly ghastly
examples of our schooling conditions. But such
horror stories aside, we are coming to recognize
that schools as we know them appear designed^#^
every level to sabotage the supposed goals of edu¬
cation. A child arrives at school bright and early
in his life. By drabness we deprive him of interests.

By fixed curriculum and sequence we rob him of
his orientation, initiative and motivation, and by
testing and scoring we subvert his natural intelli¬
gence.

Schools as we know them all run on the same
principles: iron all subjects flat and then proceed,
in groups, at a forced march across the flattened
plain. Material is dumped on the students and their
responses calibrated; their interaction and involve¬
ment with the material is not encouraged nor taken
into consideration, but their dutifulness of response
is carefully monitored.

While an exact arrangement of intended motiva¬
tions for the student is preset within the system,
they do not usually take effect according to the
ideal. It is not that students are /mmotivated, but
motivated askew. Rather than seek to achieve in
the way they are supposed to, students turn to
churlishness, surliness, or intellectual sheepishness.

A general human motivation is god-given at the
beginning and warped or destroyed by the edu¬
cational process as we know it; thus we internalize
at last that most fundamental of grownup goals:
just to get through another day.

Because of this procedure our very notion of
human ability has suffered. Adult mentality is

(JoMoef-fEACh

W VI

An interesting point, incidentally, is that people read this a lot of different ways.

One Dean of Education hilariously misread it as an across the board plug for CAI.
Others read in it various forms of menace or advocacy of generalized mechanization.
One letter-writer said I was a menace but at least writing articles kept me off the
streets. Here is my fundamental point: computer assiste d instruction , applied thought¬
lessly and imitatively , threatens to extend the worst features of education as it now .

L cauterized. and we call it "normal.” Most people's
minds are mostly turned off most of the time. We
know virtually nothing of human abilities except
as they have been pickled and boxed in schools; we
need to ignore all that and start fresh. To want stu¬
dents to be "normal” is criminal, when we are all
so far below our potential. Buckminster Fuller, in
/ Seem To Be A Verb, says we are all born ge¬
niuses: Sylvia Ashton-Warner tells us in Teacher
of her success with this premise, and of the bril-
» liance and creative potential she was able to find in

j all her schoolchildren.

Curricula themselves destructively arrange the
study situation. By walls between artificially segre¬
gated "studies” and "separate topics” we forbid the
pursuit of interest and kill motivation.

| In ordinary schooling, the victim cannot orient

j himself to the current topic except by understand-

gftUety iooK*

ing the official angle of approach and presenta¬
tion. Though tie-ins to previous interests and
knowledge are usually the best way to get an initial
sense of a thing, there is only time to consider the
officially presented tie-ins. (Neither is there time
to answer questions, except briefly and rarely well
— and usually in a way that promotes "order” by
discouraging "extraneous” tie-ins from coming up.)

The unnecessary division and walling of sub¬
jects, sequencing and kibbling of material lead peo¬
ple to expect simplifications, to feel that naming a
thing is understanding it, to fear complex wholes;
to believe creativity means recombination, the
parsing of old relations, rather than synthesis.

Like political boundaries, curriculum boundar¬
ies arise from noticeable features of a continuum
and become progressively more fortified. As be¬
hind political borders, social unification occurs
within them, so that wholly dissimilar practitioners
who share a name come to think they do the same
thing. And because they talk mainly to each other,
they forget how near is the other side of the border.

Because of the fiction of "subjects,” great con¬
cern and consideration has always gone into cal¬
culating the "correct” teaching sequence for each
"subject.” In recent years radical new teaching se¬
quences have been introduced for teaching various
subjects, including mathematics and physics. But
such efforts appear to have been misinformed by
the idea of supplanting the "wrong” teaching se¬
quence with the “right” teaching sequence, one
which is "validated.” Similarly, we have gone from
a time when the instructional sequence was a bal¬
ance between tradition and the lowest common de¬
nominator of each subject, to a time when teachers
may pick "flexible optimized strategies” from text-

If the computer is a universal control system,
let’s give kids universes to control.

7,Vt

Some premises relevant to teaching

1. The human mind is born free, ye! everywhere *
t it is in chains. The educational system serves j

mainly lo destroy for most people, in varying »
degrees, intelligence, curiosity, enthusiasm, und *
intellectual initiative and self-confidence. Wc £
are horn with these. They arc gone or severely £
diminished when we leave school. £

2. Everything is interesting, until ruined for us. *
Nothing in the universe is intrinsically unin- «
teresting. Schooling systematically ruins things £
for us, wiping out these interests, the last thing £
to be ruined determines your profession. £

3. There arc no "subjects ” The division of the £
universe into "subjects" for teaching is a mat- £
ter of tradition and administrative convenience. £

4. There is no natural or necessary order of I

learning. Teaching sequences are arbitrary. £
explanatory hierarchies philosophically spuri- £
ous. "Prerequisites” arc a fiction spawned by *
the division of the world into "subjects;" and £
maintained by not providing summaries, intro- ♦
duclions or orientational materials except lo *
those arriving through a certain door. £

5. Anyone retaining his natural mental facilities £

can learn anything practically on his own, £
given encouragement and resources. £

6. Most teachers mean well, but they are so £

concerned with promoting their images, atli- £
tudes and style of order that very little else £
can be communicated in the time remaining, £
and almost none of it attractively. £

books. 1 And this all ignores a simple fact; all arc
arbitrary. Instructional sequences aren't needed at all
if the people are motivated and the materials are clear
and available

Testing as we know it (integrated with walled curric¬
ula and instructional sequences) is a destructive activ¬
ity, particularly for the orientation which it creates.
The concerns of testing arc extraneous; learning to
figure out low-level twists in questions that lead no¬
where. under pressure.

The system of tensions and defenses it creates in the
student's personality are unrelated to the subject or
the way people might relate to the subject. An exploit¬
ive attitude is fostered. Not becoming involved with
the subject, the student grabs for rote payoff rather
than insight.

All in a condescending circumstance. Condescension
is built into the system at all levels, so pervasive it is
scarcely noticed. Students arc subjected to a grim
variety of put-downs and denigrations. While many
people evidently believe this to be right, its productivity
in building confident and sclf-rcspccling minds may be
doubted

The problems of the school arc not particularly the
teacher's fault. The practice of leaching is principally
involved with managing the class, keeping up face, and
projecting the image of the subject that conforms to the
teacher's own predilections. The educational system is
thereby committed to the fussy and prissy, to the en¬
forcement of peculiar standards ol righteousness and
the elevation of teachers—a huge irrelevant shell
around the small kernel of knowledge transmitted.

The usual attacks on computer teaching tend lo be
sentimental and emotional pleas for the alleged hu¬
manism of the existing system. Those who arc opposed
to the use of computers to teach generally believe the
computer to be "cold” and “inhuman." The teacher
is considered "warm” and "human." This view is ques¬
tionable on both sides.

The computer is as inhuman as we make it. The
computer is no more “cold" and “inhuman” than a
toaster, bathtub or automobile (all associated with

warm human activities). Living teachers can he as in¬
human as members of any people-prodding profession,
sometimes more so. Computcrists speak of "freeing
teachers for the creative part of their work;” in many
cases it is not clear what creative tasks they could be
freed for.

At the last, it is lo rescue the student from the in¬
human teacher, and allow him lo relate directly and
personally to the intrinsically interesting subject mat¬
ter, that wc need to use computers in education.

Many successful systems of tcachcrless learning exist
in our society; professional and industrial magazines;
conventions and their display booths and brochures,
technical sales pitches (most remarkably, those of med¬
ical “detail men”); hobbyist circles, which combine
personal acquaintance with a round of magazines and
gatherings; think-tanks and research institutes, where-
specialists trade fields, and the respectful briefing.

None of these is like the conventional classroom
with its haughty resource-chairman; they arc not run
on condescension, and they get a lot across. Wc tend
lo think they are not "education" and that the methods
cannot be transferred or extended to the regions now
ruled by conventional teaching. But why not?

If everything we ate were kibbled into uniform dog-
food, and the amount consumed at each feeding time
tediously watched and tested, wc would have little
fondness for eating But this is what the schools do lo
our food for thought, and this is what happens to
people s minds in primary school, secondary school
and most colleges

rJw'n ,he Way 10 P foduce a n*fion of sheep or
" C are senous . obout wanting people to have
creafve and energetic minds, it is not what w C ought

wiX wCT and e " ,hu * iasm arc na ‘ u ' a ' >hc human
spirit, why drown them?

Education ought to be dear, inviting and enjoyable,
without boohy-irnps. humiliations, condescension or
boredom It ought to leach and reward initiative, curi¬
osity, the hnhit of self-motivation, intellectual involve¬
ment. Student* should develop, through practice, abili¬
ties to think, argue and disagree intelligently.

Educators and computer enthusiasts tend to agree on
these goals. Bui what happens 0 Many of the inhuman¬
ities of the existing system, no less wrong for being
unitentional. are being continued into computer-assist¬
ed teaching

Although the promoters of computer-assisted instruc¬
tion, affectionately called “cai,” seem to think of them¬
selves as being at the vanguard of progress in all di¬
rections. the field already seems to operate according
:o a stereotype. We may call this "classic" or "conven-
ional" CAt. a way of thinking depressingly summarized
n “The Use of Computers in Education ” by Patrick
iuppes. Scientific American, September, 1966, 206-
220. an article of semi-classic stature.

It is an unexamined premise of this article that the
computer system will always decide what the student
is to study and control his movements through it. The
student is to be led by the nose through every subject,
and the author expresses perplexity over the question
of how the system can decide, at all times, where to
lead the student by the nose (top of col. 3, p. 219).
But let us not anticipate alternatives.

It is often asserted (as by AJpcrt and Bitzer in '* Ad¬
vances in Computer-Based Education Science.
March 20, 1970) that this is not the only approach
current. The trouble is that it seems to be the only ap¬
proach current, and in the expanding computer uni¬
verse everyone seems to know what cai “is.” And this
is it.

Computer-assisted instruction, in this classical sense,
is the presentation by computer of bite-sized segments
of instructional material, branching among them ac¬
cording to involuntary choices by the student ("an¬
swers”) and embedding material presented the student
in some sort of pseudo-conversation (“Very good
Now, Johnny, point at the . . .")

CAI: Based on unnecessary premises

At whichever level of complexity, all these conven¬
tional cai systems are based on three premises: that
all presentations consists of items, short chunks and
questions; that the items are arranged into sequences,
though these sequences may branch and vary under
control of the computer; and finally, that these sequen¬
ces are to be embedded in a framework of dialogue;
with the computer composing sentences and questions
appropriately based on the student’s input and the
branching structure of the materials. Let us call such
systems sic (Sequenced-Item Conversational) systems.

These three premises are united. For there to be
dialogue means there must be an underlying graph
structure of potential sequences around which dialogue
may be generated; for there to be potential sequences
means breakpoints, and hence items.

Let us question each of the premises in turn.

1. Is dialogue pleasant or desirable? Compulsory
interaction, whether with a talking machine or a stereo¬
typed human, is itself a put-down or condescension.
(Note that on superhighways there is often a line of
cars behind the automatic loll booths, even when the
manned ones are open.) Moreover, faked interaction
can be an annoyance. (Consider the green light at the
automatic toll booth that lights up with a “thank you.")
Moreover, dialogue by simple systems tends to have a
fake quality. It is by no means obvious that phony
dialogue with a machine will please the student.

2. Is the item approach necessary? If the student
were in control, he could move around in areas of
material, leaving each scene when he got what he want¬
ed. or found it unhelpful.

3. Are sequences necessary? Prearranged sequences
become unnecessary if the student can see what he has
yet to leant, then pursue it.

fte- sense ot prestige and parhcipalron

CAI: unnecessary complication

The general belief among practitioners is that ma¬
terials .for computer-based teaching are extremely dif¬
ficult to create, or "program." Because of possible
item weakness and the great variety of possible se¬
quences within the web, extensive experimentation and
debugging are required. Each item must be carefully
proven; and the different sequences open to a student
must all be tested for their effectiveness. All possible
misunderstandings by a student need to be anticipated
and prevented in this web of sequences, which must be
designed for its coverage, correct order, and general
effectiveness.

CAI: general wroogfulness

Computers offer us the first real chance to let the
human mind grow to its full potential, as it cannot
within the stifling and insulting setting of existing
school systems. Yet most of the systems for computer-
assisted instruction seem to me lo be perpetuating and
endorsing much that is wrong, even evil, in our present
educational system, cai in its conventional fo r m en¬
larges and extends the faults of the American educa¬
tional system itself They are;

• Conduciveness to boredom;

• The removal of opportunities for initiative,

• Gratuitous concerns, both social and administra¬
tive (“subject." "progress" in subject),

• Grades, which really reflect commitment level,
anxiety, and willingness to focus on core emphasis;

• Stereotyped and condescending treatment of the
student (the “Now-Johnny” box in the computer re¬
placing the one that sits before the class).

• The narrowing of curricula and available materials
for "results" at the expense of motivation and general¬
ized orientation,

• Destructive testing of a kind we would not permit
on delicate machinery, and.

• An overt or hidden emphasis on invidious ratings.
(Ungraded schools are nice—but how many units did
you complete today?).

There arc of course improvements, for instance in
the effects of testing. In the tell-tcst, tell-tesl nattering
of cai, the testing becomes merely an irritant, but one
certainly not likely to foster enthusiasm,

But isn't CAI ‘scientific?’

Part of cai's mystique is based upon the idea that
leaching can become "scientific" in the light of modern
research, especially learning theory. It is understand¬
able that researchers should promote this view and
that others should fall for it.

Laymen do not understand, nor arc they told, that
"learning theory” is an extremely technical, mathemat¬
ically oriented, description of the behavior of abstract
and idealized organisms learning non-unified things
under specific conditions of motivation and non-dis¬
traction.

Let us assume, politely, that learning theory is a
full and consistent body of knowledge. Because of its
name, learning theory has at least what wc may call
nominal relevance to teaching; hut real relevance is
another matter, it may he relevant as Newtonian equa¬
tions arc to shooting a good game of pool: implicit but
without practical bearing.

Because of the actual character of learning theory,
and its general remoteness from non-stcrilc conditions,
actual relevance to any particular type of application
must still be demonstrated. To postulate that the theory
still applies in diluted or shifted circumstances is a
leap of faith. Human beings arc not. taken all together,
very like the idealized pigeons or rats of learning
theory, and their motivations and other circumstances
arc not easily controlled. Studies concerned with rate
of repetition and reinforcement are scarcely relevant
if the student hates or docs not understand what he is
doing.

I do not mean to attack all iai. or am teaching
system which is cltcciivc and gratifying. What I doubt
is that sit systems lor c ai will become more and more
wonderful as effort progresses, m that the goal of talk¬
ing tutorial systems is reachable and appmjui.iic. And
what I further suspect is that we are building Ixuvdom
systems that nol only make hie duller hut sap intellec¬
tual interest in the same old way.

Should systems ‘instruct?*

Drill-and-practice systems arc definitely a good thing
for the acquisition of skills and response sets, an im¬
provement over workbooks and lhe like, furnishing
both corrections and adiustmcnt. I hey are boring, hut
probably less so than the usual materials. Bui the c ai
enthusiasts seem to believe the same convorsalionali/ed
chunk techniques can he cxlenled lo the realm of ideas,
to systems that will tutor and chide, and that this will
provide the same sort of natural interest provided by
a live tutor's instruction.

The conventional point of view in cai claims that
because validation is so important, it is necessary to
have a standardized format of item, sequence and dia¬
logue. This justifies turning the endeavor into picky-
work within items and sequence complexes, with
attendant curricular freeze, and student inanition and
boredom. This is entirely premature. The variety of
alternative systems for computer leaching have nol
even begun lo he explored. Should systems "instruct "
ai all?

‘Responding Resources’ and ‘Hyper-Media*

At no previous time has it been povsihle to create
learning resources so responsive and interesting, or lo
give such free play to the student's initiative as we may
now. Wc can now build computer-based presentational
wonderlands, where a student (or other user) may
browse and ramble through a vast variety of writings,
pictures and apparitions in magical space, as well as
rich data structures and facilities for twiddling them.

I hese wc may call, collectively, "responding resources."
Responding resources arc of two types: facilities und
hyper-media.

A futility is something the user may call up to pci-
form routinely n computation or other act. behaving
in desired ways on demand Thus joss (a clever desk
calculator available at a terminal) and the Culler-Freed
graph-plotting system (which graphs arbitrary func¬
tions the user types in) are facilities.

Hyper-media arc branching or performing presenta¬
tions which respond to user actions, systems of pre¬
arranged words and pictures (for example) which may
he explored freely or queried in stylized ways. They
will not he ‘•programmed." bill rather designed, written
drawn and edited, hv authors, artists, designers and
editors (To call them "programmed” would suggest
spurious technicality Computer systems to present
them will he “programmed.”) l ike ordinary prose anti
pictures, they will be media: and because they are in
some sense “multi-dimensional." wc may call them
Itvper-media, following the mathematical use of the
term "hyper-”.

A modest proposal

The alternative is straightforward. Instead of devis¬
ing elaborate systems permitting (he computer or it*
instructional contents to control the situation, why
not permit the student to control the system, show him
how to do so intelligently, and make ji easy for him
to find his own way? Discard the sequences, items
and conversation, and allow the student to move freely
through materials which he may control. Never mind
optimizing reinforcement or validating teaching se¬
quences. Motivate the user and let him loose in a
wonderful place.

Let the student control the sequence, put him in
control of interesting and clear material, and make him
feel good—comfortable, interested, and autonomous.
Teach him to orient himself: not having the system
answer questions, all typed in, but allowing the student
to gel answers by looking in a fairly obvious place.
(Dialogue is unnecessary even when it does not in¬
trude.) Such ultra-rich environments allow the student
to choose what he will study, when he will study it and
how he will study it, and lo what criteria of accomplish¬
ment he will aim. Let the student pick what he wishes
to study next, decide when he wishes lo be tested, and
give him a variety of interesting materials, events and
opportunities. Let the student ask to be tested on what
he thinks he knows, when he is ready, selecting the
most appropriate form of testing available.

This approach has several advantages. First, it cir¬
cumvents the incredible obstacles created by the
dialogue-item-sequence philosophy. It ends the danger
to students of bugs in the material. And last, it does
what education is supposed to do—foster student en¬
thusiasm, involvement, and self-reliance.

Under such circumstances students will actually be
interested, motivated to achieve far more than they
have ever achieved within the normal instructional
framework; and any lopsidedness which may result
will be far offset by the degree of accomplishment
which will occur—it being much better to create lop¬
sided but enthusiastic genius specialists than listless,
apathetic, or cruelly rebellious mediocrities. If they
start soon enough they may even reach adulthood with
natural minds: driven by enthusiasm and interest,
crippled in no areas, eager to learn more, and far
smarter than people ordinarily end up being.

Enthusiasm and involvement are what really count.
This is why the right to explore far outweighs any
administrative advantages of creating and enforcing
"subjects" and curriculum sequences. The enhancement
of motivation that will follow from letting kids learn
anything they want to learn will far outweigh any
specialization (hat may result. By the elimination or
benign replacement of both curriculum and tests in an
ultra-rich environment, we will prevent the attrition of
the natural motivation of children from its initially
enormous levels, and mental development will be the
natural straight diagonal rather than the customary
parabola.

Is it so hard? some ideas

cai is said to be terribly hard. It would seem all the
harder, then, to give students the richer and more
stimulating environments advocated here. This is be¬
cause of the cramped horizons of computer teaching
today. Modest goals have given us modest visions, far
below what is now possible and will soon be cheap.

Discrete (Chunk Style) Hypertexts

The static computer displays now associated with
cai will give way to dynamic displays driven from
minicomputers, such as the idiiom, ibm 2250 4 or
Imlac pos-l. (The last of these costs only $10,000
mm by 1975 such a unit will probably cost $1,000
or less.) Not only will computers be much cheaper, but
their usability will improve: a small computer with a
fair amount of memory will be able lo do much more
than it can now, including operate a complex display
from its own complex data base.

It is generally supposed that systems like these need
big computers and immense memories. This is not
true if we use the equipment well, organize storage
cleverly, and integrate data and display functions under
a compact monitor. This is the goal of The Nelson
Organization’s Project Xanadu, a system intended to
handle all the functions described here on a mini¬
computer with disk and tape.

Discrete hypertexts

“Hypertext” means forms of writing which branch
or perform on request; they are best presented on com¬
puter display screens.

In ordinary writing the author may break sequence
for footnotes or insets, but the use of print on prpr
makes some basic sequence essential. The compu,
display screen, however, permits footnotes on footnotes
on footnotes, and pathways of any structure the author
wants to create.

Discrete, or chunk style, hypertexts consist of sepa¬
rate pieces of text connected by links.

Ordinary prose appears on the screen and may be
moved forward and back by throttle. An asterisk or
other key in the text means, not an ordinary footnote,
but a jump —to an entirely new presentation on the
screen. Such jumpable interconnections become part
of the writing, entering into the prose medium itself as
a new way to provide explanations and details to the
seeker. These links may be artfully arranged according
to meanings or relations in the subject, and possible
tangents in the reader’s mind.

Welcomingness and control

CHOICE POINT

■ GO ON

I DON'T UNDERSTAND

■ SO FAR I’M BORED

* EXPLAIN THE BIG PICTURE

■ DETAILS PLEASE

■ TIE THIS IN WITH SOMETHING

I KNOW

LET’S GO BACK TO LAST CHOICE]
\ POINT

\« GIVE ME MORE CHOICES

MORE CHOICES

TEST ME
DRILL ME
RIDDLE ME

DRAW ME A DIAGRAM
TELL ME A RELEVANT JOKE
CHANGE THE SUBJECT
SURPRISE ME

A hypergram is a performing or branching picture;
for instance, this angle, with the bar-graph of its re¬
lated trigonometric functions. The student may turn
the angle upon the screen, seizing it with the light-pen,
and watch the related trigonometric functions, dis¬
played as bar charts, change correspondingly.

Hypergrams may also be programmed to show the
consequences of a user’s prod—what follows or ac¬
companies some motion of the picture that he makes
with a pointing tool, like the heartbeat sequence.

Stretchtext^!

Lills iii (he details

This form or hypertext is easy to use without getting
lost. As a form of writing, it has special advantages for
aiscursive and loosely structured materials—lor in¬
stance historical narratives.

There arc a screen and two throttles. The first
throttle moves (he text forward and backward, up and
down on the screen. The second throttle causes changes
in the writing itself; throttling toward you causes the
texl to become Iona . r by minute degrees. Gaps appear
between phrases; words and phrases pop into the
gaps, an item at a lime. Push back on the throttle and
the writing becomes shorter and less detailed.

The stretchtext is stored as a text stream with extras,
coded to pop in ami pop out at the desired altitudes:

i -A

Stretchtext is a form of wrilimj,
It is rend from a screen. The user
controls it with throttles. It yets
longer and shorter on demand.

Stretchtext, a kind of hypertext,
is basically a form of writing closely
related to other prose. It is read by
a user or student from a computer
display screen. The user, or student,
controls it, and causes it to change,
with throttles connected to the
computer. Stretchtext gets longer,

\ by adding words and phrases, or
l shorter, by subtracting words and
\ phrases, on demand.

The student of anatomy may use his light-pen as a
scalpel for a deceased creature on the screen. As he
cuts, the tissue parts. He could also turn the light-pen
into hemostal or forceps, and fully dissect the creature
—or pul it back together again, fThis need not be a
complex simulation. Many key relationships can be
shown by means of fairly simple schematic pictures,
needing a data structure not prohibitively complicated.)

Hypermap zips up or down

The screen is a map. A steering device permits the
user to move the map around the world’s surface; a
throttle zooms it in. Not by discrete jumps, but ani¬
mated in small changes, the map grows and grows in
scale. More details appear as the magnification in¬
creases. The user may request additional display modes
or “overlays,” such as population, climate, and indus¬
try. Such additional features may pop into view on

A “hypergram” is a picture that can branch or per¬
form on request. In this particular example, we see
on the screen a line-drawing with protruding labels.
When the student points at a label, it becomes a sliding
descriptive ribbon, explaining the thing labelled.

Or asterisks in an illustration may signal jumps to
detailed diagrams and explanations, as in discrete
hypertexts.

f typcr-comics arc fun

Hyper-comics arc perhaps the simplest and most
straightforward hyper-medium. The screen holds a
comic strip, but one which branches on the student's
request. For instance, different characters could be used
to explain things in diJTcrcnl ways, with the student able
to choose which type of explanation he wanted at a
specific lime

‘Tcchnicalitv' is not necessary

Proponents of cai want us to believe that scientific
teaching requires a certain setup and format, incom¬
prehensible to the layman and to be left to experts.
This is simply not true. “Technicality” is a myth. The
problem is not one of technical rightness, but what
should be.

The suggestions that have been given are things that
should be; they will be brought about. □

DM 20

It wbb explained on the other side that
computers have no fixed purpose or style of
operation, but can be set in motion on detailed
and repetitive tasks in any realm of human in¬
terest-- as long as those tasks are exactly
specifiable in certain humdrum ways.

Now, if you had a machine like that
burning a hole in the comer of your office,
what would you really want to do with it?

You can't drive it on the road.

You can't make love to it. (But see p.' 1 ’*.)

You can't cook in it, or get the news

on it.

To get it to control elaborate events in
the real world requires a lot of expensive equip¬
ment and interfaces, so cross that out.

Yet suppose you have an inquiring imag¬
ination-- which is not unlikely, considering
that you are reading this sentence.

And we are also supposing (from an ear¬
lier paragraph) that you have a computer.

What sorts of thing would you do with it?

Things that are imaginative and don't
require too much else.

f am hinting at something.

too IT wkff rn oeey

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and If chla idea doesn't cum you on,

the rest of this book is probably not for you.

The techniques of making plcturea by
computer are called computer graphics .

But that includes the dull kinds of making
pictures by computer, the ones that do it with
pens and printing machines.

You will therefore we that to understand
all the different computer display terminals,
you would have to understand all the different
computer display techniques; unfortunately
we can only cover a few here, and those but
sparely.

The techniques of making computers
present things interactively on screens Is called
computer display . (Some say "interactive com¬
puter graphics;" this is not just too long, but
too restrictive as well: interactive text systems
are not "graphic" or pictorial, but they are going
to be a profoundly important area of computer
display.)

(Incidentally, the silly word "interaction”
was coined because the previous word "inter¬
course.” which meant exactly the same thing,
had racy connotations for some people. Cf.
"donkey" and "rooster," also relatively recent.)

You will note that computer display is
whet makes possible the computer terminals with
screens that we saw on the other side. All
that a screen-terminal is is some sort of com¬
puter display, to which a keyboard has been
added.

Some of the types of computer display to
be covered hereabouts include;

CRT, or cathode-ray tube, displays;

these are my favorite because the
stuff on their screens may be
animated by the computer.

video displays, which use television

techniques. These have troubles
deriving from the way a TV picture
is timed.

panel displays, i.e., those which appear
on a flat panel. These are going
to be cropping up all over. (The
pictures can't move much, but the
devices are going to be cheap.

Flat, too. Some people think that's
very important.)

3-D displays, especially of the CRT type.
NOTE; this term refers ambiguously
to two different things: setups which
present Oat views of three-dimensional
scenes, and those which present
stereoscopic views of 3 D scenes;
these are much rarer.

image synthesis or' halftone techniques

and systems. These are computer
programs and special devices which
make shaded or photograph-like
pictures. (This happens to be a
favorite topic of mine, and so there's
quite a bit on it here, a lot of which
is not widely known in the field.)

bibliography * CYC*

Newman and Sproull, Interactive Computer Graphics . _
McGrav, $15. Your basic text on all forms of^
computer graphics (and thus animation).

Responding computer displays
come in all sizes and prices. This
little setup (in the under-$10,000
class) is a PDP-8 minicomputer with
home-built display circuitry. Gothic
lettering data structure available
from somebody in the military; mes¬
sage courtesy of R.E.S.I.S.T.O.R.S.
The big display is an IBM 2250 (over
$100,000, including minicomputer).

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Some computer displays have to be deeply
attached to • computer and some don't. These
latter we call display terminals .

A display terminal is like an ordinary
computer terminal (see p If): that is, funda¬
mentally a device by which a computer and a
person can type at each other .However, dis¬
play terminals have screens.

Now, some display terminals only show
text, just like ordinary printing terminals
(described on the other side). But manufac¬
turers are free to add any other features, and
so different manufacturers make it possible to
do various kinds of picture-making with their
particular display terminals, if appropriate
programs are running in the computer that con¬
trols them.

Some devices are sold as display terminals
but actually, to further confuse the issue,
contain complete minicomputers. (The fact
that the manufacturer may not stress this is
simply a marketing angle he has chosen.) Simi¬
larly, certain terminals contain microprocessors
(see p. V4 ), which means they can be programmed
to benave like various other terminals, but ordi¬
narily they cannot be programmed to do much else
by themselves.

Without getting into it deeply, there are two main
types of display terminal: those that are refreshed and
those that are not. A refreshed display is one whose
viewing surface fades and must be continually re-filled;
a non-refreshed display somehow stores the presentation
in the viewing surface itself.

Non-refreshed displays simply take the symbols
from the computer, blam them onto the screen, and that's
it until the screen is erased (by cither the computer or
the user).

This honey ia the GT-40
from DEC ($12,000, in¬
cluding computer — the
thing with teeth, below),
It’a a eubroutining
diaplay (eee p . DH 23).

Han ia playing Moon-
lander game: control¬
ling screen action with

lightpen. Computer eimulatee real moon lander
Pevereed white-ta-black for readability here.

Refreshed displays have to have sone other kind of
of symbolic (digital) memory, whose contents repeated¬
ly go to the screen:

Most refreshed displays use an actual television
screen-- that is, a CRT (see p.b^t-7) whose entire area
is repeatedly re-painted by the clctron beam.

Since computers send text out to terminals as in¬
dividual alphabetic and punctuation codes, each terminal
must contain circuitry to change the character code to a
visible alphabetical character on the screen. Such a
piece of circuitry is called a character generator. There
are various kinds, they go at various speeds, some offer
more different characters than others.

Display terminals generally have a little marker, or
cursor , that the user or the computer can move around the
screen. The computer can sense what the user is pointing
at by the motion codes it gets, telling where the user has
moved the cursor.

I had intended here to print a little directory of
display terminal manufacturers, but there simply is not
time. See section on terminals, other side.

Note that the term video terminal is often used, in¬
correctly, for any display terminal. The term "video"
should only be used when the screen is refreshed by an
actual video raster. (See "Lightning in a Bottle," p.^Atf-f.)

Text terminals (also called alphabetic terminals,
character terminals or keyscopes) simply show written text,
put in either by the computer or the user. (Some terminals,
called transaction terminals, can be divided up into specific
areas that" "the user may and may not type into-- for banking
and stuff. However, whether that form of terminal is
necessary may also be a matter of taste in the program
design.)

Text terminals range in price from, say, $1500 on up
to $6500. (This last is the price of a remarkable color
text terminal demonstrated by Tec, Inc., at the 1974 National
Computer Conference. Each alphabetic position could con¬
tain a letter and/or a bright color; altogether the screen
could hold big colorful pictures made up of these bright
spaces. Ostensibly just a text terminal, actually the de¬
vice could be regarded as an Instant Movie Generator for
television animation. But it may take Tec, Inc. awhile to
realize what they have created.)

Graphic terminals offer some kind of pictures on their
screens. TKese come in a great variety: line-drawing, some
without, some with levels of grey. Of interest to the be¬
ginner are;

"The Tektronix." (Also called "the greenie," or
"the green screen.") Tektronix, Inc., makes a
display based on a pale green storage tube they
make. (So does Computer Displays, Inc.) Such
displays allow you to put more and more text and
pictures on a screen, crowding it all up-- but
you can't take the lines or words off individually.

"The PEP." Excellent (but very expensive) display
that comes out to a video screen from a high-re¬
solution storage tube. Permits grey scales and
selective erase. Princeton Electronic Products.

T»|E WOH)>T^oF
iHTOMSJlte tty WTEftf

If you have not seen interactive computer
display, you have not lived.

The IDIgraf (Information Displays, Inc., Mount Kisco,
NY). Allows line pictures with animation ; interest¬
ing unit; somewhat less than $10,000.

A PLATO-like terminal (see PLATO terminal, nearby, and
ppfMfc-JT) is now available for use with STANDARD com¬
puter interfaces and software. "Less than $5000"
from Applications Group, Inc., P.0. Box 444A, Maumee,
Ohio 43537.

Except for a few people who can imagine it--
and I m trying to help you with that as hard as ]
can-most people just don't get it till they sei
it. They can't imagine what it's like to manipu¬
late a picture. To have a diagram respond to yoi
To-^jange one part of a picture, anT watbi tTTe' ri
adapt. These are some of the things that can hat
pen in interactive computer display-- all depend]
of course, on the program. P

For . SOBe reason there are a lot of people w)
pooh-pooh computer display: they say it's "not

?ss: , :: rjr -v r " n ? t worth u *" ° r that "y° u can *

just as good results other ways."

ti..nf erSOnall)r ' 1 wouldn,t thing of trying to
So computer display on "practical" grounds.
■aH™ 5 offers X° u faster access to infor-
■ation and pictures and maps amt diagrams, the

t0 * 1Bulate extremely complex things by
comw 11 ? piCtur ? 5 ' the ability to go through
* fractions with the system in ver}
world i * he ablllt > r to create things in the
«orld almost instantaneously (say, by creating
fabric patterns which .are then automatically 8
deS t?V£ objects whicb are then auto-
tKt i{ ly *M led u y macbines )» and never mind
oil refin!! S / he u US ! r ! f ay ' t0 contr ol entire
1 refineries by the flick of a lightpen.

far * s I,|n concerned, these matters
world- »°u y 1B P° rtant compared to changing the
thlk - ® . ln R education an excitement, rather
writik prx *° n; Raving scholars total access to
peonl!! R ?„ an i notes ’ in new complex form; allowin
lind t! * y imaginatively, and raising human
long avo- t »H P k t t ntlals they 5hould ha ve reached
level ihn,.r d hel P in « people think at the deepes
which confrnnt 1 ^ " eavy and C0 *P lex alternatives-
cn c °nfront us more ominously today than ever

REFRESHED HIGH-RESOLUTION COLOR SYSTEMS. A number of
companies manufacture computer displays allowing com¬
plex grey-scale pictures, including color. They are
expensive but very very nice. Indeed, if you buy them
in clusters, these fancy-picture scopes can cost as
little as text terminals. Some manufacturers are:

Data frisk . (Disk refresh.) Note: I once recommend¬
ed them to a consulting client of mine, who
later expressed complete satisfaction with
their equipment.

Ramtek. ($«-,.d»A3«0

Adage , Inc . Their model 200 is a video system re¬
freshed from semiconductor storage.

Comtal . (Disk.)

Spatial Data Systems . (Disk.)

Dlcorned . (Disk.) Extremely high resolution.

Student programmer Alan McNeil,
an art major, pondere something
or other. It may be the program
for the Nova apace-game he and
Pete Rowell are building.

Alan also made a film shoeing what
may have been the motions of the
continents, shooting straight off
the PLATO screen.

Some PLATO purists point out that
this is not exactly what PLATO
was originally intended for. So?

PLATO panel display (aee OH 26-7).

DH 21

The computer display screen Is the new
frontier of our lives.

That such systems should (and will) be
fun goes without saying. That they will also
be a place to work may be less obvious from
Ihe tone of this publication, bo 1 want to atresa
it here.

Making pictures with the GE
halftone system (sea pp. DM 32-9).

The thing about diaplay screens-- especial¬
ly the high-performance, subroutining kind--
is that the screen can become a place from
which to control events in the outside world.

Example: I believe a town in N.Y. State
has its electrical system hooked up to an ID1IOM
subroutining display (made by Information Dis¬
plays, Inc., and coupled to a Varian 620 mini¬
computer). Instead of having a wall with a big
painted map having switches set into it. like
many such control centers, the switches are
linked directly to the minicomputer, and a pro¬
gram in the minicomputer connects these circuits
to the pictures on the screen. Thus to throw
a switch in the real world, the operator points
with his lightpen at Ute picture of the switch ,
and the minicomputer throws the switch.

There are oil refineries that work the
same way. The operator can control flows
among pipes and tanks by pointing at their
pictures, or at symbols connected with them,
and bingo, it happens Out There.

In another case, a person designing some¬
thing at a screen can look across the room and
see a machine producing what he just finished
designing a few minutes ago. I wish I could
say more about that particular setup.

The true problem that I think is emerging,
though, is the problem of system response and
style . Okay, so you're controlling widget
assembly, or traffic light grids, at the CRT
screen. The real question is, how does the
screen behave and respond ? This is not, darn
it, a technical issue. It's psychological and
then some. The design of screen activities
which will enjoyably focus the user's mind on
his proper concerns-- no matter how personal
these may be-- is the new frontier of design,
of art, and of architecture. But more of that
later.

Now. the Xerox Corporation has said that
they intend to replace paper (or. the way I
heard it, " Somebody is going to replace paper
with screens, and it will be either IBM or us,
so let's have it be us.")

Well and good. Save the trees and stem
the grey menace. But the question is: what
will the systems be like? How should they per¬
form? What forms will information take? What
conventions, structures, diagrams, animations,
ways to sign things, ways to view things ...

HOW SHALL IT BE?

I am afraid that as long as people are be¬
fuddled with technicalities, or confused by those
who profess that these considerations are their
specialty by right, we will never get straight.
Lacking time for the full discussion, I give you
a motto:

IF THE BUTTON IS NOT SHAPED LIKE THE THOUGHT,
THE THOUGHT WILL END UP SHAPED LIKE THE BUTTON.

SAVING ENERGY WITH COMPUTER DISPLAY

A timely criticism of computer display is
that it needs electricity. But (as mentioned
elsewhere) it saves paper, and, importantly, it
bodes to save energy as well.

IF WE SWITCH TO COMPUTER SCREENS FROM
PAPER, PEOPLE WON'T HAVE TO TRAVEL AS MUCH.
Instead of commuting to offices in the cen er
of town, people can set up their offices in
the suburbs, and share the documentary struc¬
ture of the work situation through the screens.

This view has been propounded, indeed, by
fnrififtr director of research for

901

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WAVE OF THE fOTUfce,

J)IJPi/iV5 ACE
me SUItFSo/tExxS.

* THC KiMJ'j *, G*W«4.

YOUR BASIC TYPES OF COMPUTER DISPLAY

(Note: the term "display" is also used
in this field to refer to numbers and letters
that can be made to light up in fixed positions,
like on your pocket calculators. Those will
not be discussed here. If you’re interested
see an article on the subject by Alan Sobel,
Scientific American , early 1973 sometime.)

THE FORKED LIGHTNING

1. EARLIEST SYSTEM: A LITTLE PROGRAM
TO MAKE DOTS

The earliest setup connected a CRT to a
computer by the simplest possible means, and
made its pictures with dots on the screen— tt
sort of tattooing process.

It was simple because all the computer
did was furnish to the connecting circuitry (or
interface ) symbols specifying how far up, and
how far across the screen, the next dot should
be. These symbols were actually coded numbers,
and the interface turned them into voltages which
then moved the beam correspondingly. (This
process of making a measured voltage out of a
coded numerical symbol is called digital-to-analog
conversion , since (as explained on the other side)
the main meaning of "analog" these days is "in
a measured voltage.")

Now, this has several drawbacks. One is
that the lines are dotty; nobody likes that. A
more important annoyance, though, is that the
computer scarcely has time for anything else .

Here is a flowchart of what the computer has to
do in its program. (Even if you didn't look at
the other side of the book, flowcharts are nothing
scary. They're just maps of what happens.)

2. LINE-DRAWING HARDWARE

The next Btep in design is to get the com¬
puter program out of the business of drawing
lines by a succession of dots. So we build a
piece of hardware that the computer program may
simply instruct to draw a line. As an interface,
it looks to the computer like four separate
devices: registers that tell where on the Bcreen
the line must start ("first X" and "first Y") and
registers that tell it where to stop ("end X" and
"end Y").

" Because their words have

forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night."

— Dylan Thomas

The most basic, and yet eventually the
most versatile, computer display is that of the
CRT. or bottled lightning (as I like to call it).

It is, you know: a beam of electrons, just like
lightning in a storm, but from the neck of a
very empty bottle to its flat bottom, whose
chemically coated surface we watch. As manip¬
ulated by the computer, the CRT stabs its beam
to all corners of the faceplate: forked lightning.

Computer display began in the late forties.
Computers themselves were completely new,
and so was Mr. Dumont's magical Cathode Ray
Tube or CRT (see p .**£?) < developed on a
crash basis during the war so we could have
radar, and as long as it was around after the
war, we got television.

But the lightning bottle, or CRT, can be
used in a variety of ways. Its control plates,
which move the ray of electrons around on the
screen, can be given various different elec¬
tronic signals, causing the beam to move around
in different patterns. In normal video, the
signals move the beam in a zigzag pattern,
where the zigs are very close together and the
zags are invisible; the carpet of zigs covers
the screen over and over in a repetitive pattern,
and the beam's changing intensity paints the
picture.

But we can drive the CRT differently,
by using different control signals. For instance:
we can apply a measured voltage to the height
or "Y" plates of the CRT, moving the beam
to a given vertical position, and another meas¬
ured voltage to the sideways or "X" plates,
controlling its horizontal position.

Furthermore, and here was the indignity
of it, this system took far too long. To draw
a line with thirty dots in it took thirty times
around the loop in the flowchart, and since each
box in the flowchart takes at least one of the
machine's rock-bottom instructions-- usually
more-- then the main loop of this display routine
takes four separate operations per dot , or 120
operations for a stupid 30-dot line. Plainly
there has to be a better way to use an expensive
computer.

Ok wrdohoo}

Screen

UJt fa

o(- Juraktl /fVe.

Actually it wasn't just the ignominy of it,
but the fact that it took so long , that made this
a poor method. The amount of stuff the compu¬
ter could draw in l/40th of a second— and this
turns out to be how fast the whole picture has
to be made-- was too little. After l/40th of a
second the human eye can see the lines on the
CRT start to fade, and so the picture has to be
redrawn to make it bright again before that
happens. If your eye sees the picture fading,
then when the computer draws the picture again
you will see it get suddenly bright again— and
it will start to flicker. This is distracting, un¬
healthy, and disagreeable.

Note that the most important computer in
the history of computer display used this tech¬
nique 1 ^ This was the TX-2 at Lincoln Labora¬
tories, a highly-guarded installation outside Bos¬
ton which is formally part of MIT. The TX-2
was one of the first transistorized computers—
perhaps the first; and on it were programmed a
number of milestone systems, including Suther¬
land's Sketchpad, Johnson's Sketchpad IV, and
Baecker's GENESYS animation system (discussed
somewhere).

This speeds things up considerably, and
allows the computer program to display on the
CRT simply by telling the device what lines it
wants drawn. Moreover, the program is free
to do other things while each line is being
drawn, though this involves the problem of how
the program is to know when it’s time to send
out another line-- and we needo't go into that
here.

(Incidentally, it is a puzzling fact that
such a device is available nowhere, although
lots of people end up building one for themselves.
There was such a thing on the market a couple
of years ago-- line-drawing hardware with no
interface and no CRT— but it was withdrawn
because of reliability problems. A just price,
if anybody wants to go into that, would be five
hundred to a thousand dolars— this year.)

3. EVOLUTION FROM THIS: TWO OPTIONS

There are basically two way3 to go from
this basic starting point. Either we can keep
the display device intimately and integrally con¬
nected to the computer, or we can say the hell
with it and cut the display device loose as a
separate entity.

Ivan Sutherland has cannily noted that
there is a certain trap involved in these designs:
as we build additional "independent" structures
to take the burden of display away from the
computer, we are tempted to keep adding fea¬
tures which make the "independent" structure a
computer in its own right. This paradoxical
temptation Sutherland calls "the great wheel of
Karma" of computer display architecture.

It ia tempting to cut the display loose from
the computer. It means the computer can be
fully occupied wtth other matters than refreshing
the screen— preparing the next displays, per¬
haps. Many computer people believe this is the
right way to do it, and it is certainly one valid
approach. But unfortunately it also drastically
reduces the immediacy of the system's reaction,
making interaction with the system less intimate
and wonderful.

Approaches which put display refreshment
and maintenance in a separate device are less
interesting to me, and so that discussion contin¬
ues separately nearby . P^iZX).

W/NpJ

4 . THE SECOND PROGRAM FOLLOWER

On the other side of the book. I explained
that a computer ia basically a zippy device,
never mind how constructed, which follows a
program somehow stored symbolically in a core
memory. Such a device we call here a grogram
follower . While programs may be in many com
puter languages - all of them contrived systems
for expressing the user's wishes, in different
styles and with different general intent - under¬
neath they all translate to an inner language of
binary patterns, which may Just be thought of
as patterns of X and 0, or light bulba on and off.
The innermost program follower of the computer
goes down lists of binary patterns stored in the
core memory, and carries them out as specific
instructions. It also changes its sequences of
operations under conditions that the programmer
has told it to watch for.

*Duriw«

PSOfrf^l

RW4 F®uout^

dt of Lijli,

Vcfrvj kej scrltth*

L*|

fray**-.

We may call this also a n list-of-lines"
system, since the commands recognized by the
display program follower are typically patterns
that tell it what lines to draw.

Typically also it has its own way of jump¬
ing around in a program, and may jump to a
specific list of lines, or subpicture, from numer¬
ous other parts of its program. always returning
each time to the point from which it had jumped.
This -allows the same subpicture to appear in
numerous places on the screen at the same time.

(A program that can be jumped to by other pro¬
grams which then resume operation is called a
subroutine ; thus the real, or most prestigious,
name for such a device is a subroutining display .)

This design has some extraordinary advan¬
tages. One is that 6ince the computer's program
follower and the display's program follower both
share the same core memory, they can work to¬
gether most intimately. When the user demands
something new-- by typing, say, or •pointing
with a light-pen-- the computer can step in and
take various actions. Its program can compose
a new picture for the user, get something from
a disk or tape memory, or switch the display's
program follower over to a new picture it has
already prepared.

Most importantly, the computer can move
images on the screen, allowing interactive ani¬
mation on the screen under the user's control.
Each time the display is about to show the same
picture again, the computer simply supplies it
with a new starting point . Since the list of lines
is typically in the form of sequences of lines
relative to one another, the picture is drawn in
a new place each time-- and thus seen to move
on the screen.

This design has some extraordinary advan¬
tages. One is that atnee the computer's program
follower and the display's program follower both
share the same core memory. they can work to¬
gether moat Intimately. When the user demands
something new-- by typing, soy, or pointing
with a light-pen-- the computer can step in and
take various actions. Us program can compose
a new picture for the user, get something from
a disk or tape memory, or switch the display's
program follower over to a new picture It has
already prepared.

Most importantly, the computer can move
images on the scren, allowing interactive ani¬
mation on the screen under the user's control.
Each time the display starts to show the same
picture again, the computer simply supplies it
with a new starting point . Since the list of lines
is typically in the form of sequences of lines
relative to one another, the picture is drawn in
a new place each time-- and thuB seen to move
on the screen.

Finally, the computer itself is free most
of the time-- free, that is, to do other things,
which typically is always desirable. Just how
much the computer can or should do in such a
partnership is n matter of dispute. (Ordinarily
such devices arc spliced onto minicomputers;
and minicomputer fans, such as the author, see
no reason not to perform all services for the dis¬
play there in the minicomputer-- and a pox on
the big machines. Others, for various reasons,
see the subroutining display and its host mini
as needing the tender ministratious of a big-
computer via some sort of communications line.
There are various reasons for holding this en¬
tirely legitimate view. People who are devoted
to the high number-crunching capacity of big
computers, or to languages which require great
big computers to run in. have a right to their
opinion. Moreover, it is currently feasible to
store large bodies of data only on big computers

— not because big disk and tape memories can't
be easily attached to the small ones, for they
con, but they usually aren’t; and other ways to
tie minicomputers to big stores of data aren't
available yet.)

Subroutining displays often hove commends
allowing them to display text as well as lines
and dots. In the display of text they can use
the same technique of "moving the picture" by
starting its display at successively creeping
points; this will cause, say, whole paragraphs
to slide on the screen. The importance of
this feature in the displaying of text cannot be
overemphasized . As more and more people have
experience with displays of different kinds, they
are beginning to realize how confusing and dis¬
orienting it is for a screen to clear and be filled
with something new to read. You don't know
where you are . On subroutining displays,
moving the text can give the reader the same
sense of orientation he gets from turning pages

— an important thing to replace.

It must be stressed here that, just as com¬
puters themselves have no fixed mode or style
of operation, neither do computer displays; and
so the purpose of such devices is simply

HELPING PEOPLE SEE AND MANIPULATE
PICTURES AND TEXT

IN ANY STYLE, AND FOR ANY PURPOSE.

Since pictures can be of anything, and text can
be about anything, this effectively comprehends
the entire mental and working life of mankind.

Many readers will scoff, supposing that
computer display systems will always cost tons
of money. This is not the case. You can al¬
ready get a beauty, with its minicomputer, for
as little as $13,000; and this price should fall
to three or four thousand within a few years--
as soon as the minicomputer manufacturers realize
that the market frontier is not in the office or
factory, but in the home. But we're getting a
bit ahead of ourselves here.

TYPES OF SUBROUTINING DISPLAY

Some early subroutining displays used a
screen-dotting technique, but took the burden of
it off the computer itself: it would extract from
core memory the instructions telling it to draw
individual lines and show text. (1 refer here
to the DEC model 338, introduced about 1965;
this attached to a PDP-8 computer (see p/'J!])
and cost about $50,000 including the computer.)
Others drew lines as straight zips of light across
the screen; an example is the IBM 2250 display,
introduced about 1966. (The model 1 of this
device buckled directly to the 360, and cost, 1
believe, something like $75,000; its successor,
the model 4, buckled to their 1130 minicomputer,
the package costing some $150,000, and then
you were supposed to attach it to an IBM 360.)
The 2250 was a good machine, but in perfor¬
mance suffers greatly from the restrictions of
the 360 computer itself (see p.4j ).

These earlier machines are being replaced
by new versions with better-designed instructions
(see "Computer Architecture," p.^L. for a sense
of what well-designed Instructions are). An es¬
pecially fine unit ia DEC’a OT40, which buckles
on the exceptionally fine PDP-11 minicomputer
(see p.'W.). The GT40 ia illustrated nearby.

It goes for some $12,000 including the computer.
(That's today . we repeat. Consider not the price
at this instant, but how fast it's going down.)

The unita mentioned above are of the moat
baalc type: "two-dimensional," whose picture#
at any given instant correspond to flat drawings
- but, of course, derive their excitement and
magnificence from their capacity to interact,
change and animate what you arc looking at.

0 K r . dp&o.

Seldom has an event in a new field had as much power and
influence as what dour Ivan Sutherland did as a young man i the
period 1960-64, ~

The SKETCHPAD system,which was basically his thesis work at
HIT, was at once inventive, profound, overwhelmingly Impressive
to laymen, and deeply elegant. Simply for the universal influence
It has had In the computer field. It deserves our close attention.

Sutherland was one of the first people to understand the use
of the computer in helping people visualize things that weren't
fully clear yet— the opposite, of course, of the conventional
notion of computers. While computers had been made to do animations
as early as the forties, and computer graphics had been put to work¬
aday duties in the old SAGE system (defending us against bombera in
the fifties— remember the good old days?), Sutherland turned com¬
puter display from an expensive curiosity Into a true dream machine.

SKETCHPAD ran on the 36-bltTX-2, a one-of-a-kind experimental
machine at Lincoln Laboratories (a military research place nominally
a part of HIT). It had a display screen, light pen and lots of handy
switches.

SKETCHPAD was basically a drawing system. But rather than
simulating paper (as some people might have done), it found splendid
ways to take advantage of the computer's special capabilities.

In the Sketchpad system, Sutherland looked for ways that a
responding computer display screen could help people design things.

He pioneered methods of drawing on screens, with such techniques
as the "rubber-band line” (a straight line on the screen, one end
of which follows your Ughtpen while the other remains fixed), and
the "instance"— a subpicture stored in core memory which could
appear numerous times and ways in a larger picture).

This picture vaguely
simulates the "instance'
facility of Sketchpad t
by uh’icn an overall
picture may be created
out of repetitions of a
c ingle master pattern.

la ted with GRASS
language (see p.31).

The mind-blowing thing about Sketchpad was the way you could
move and manipulate the picture on the screen, with all Its parts.
One overall picture could be constructed out of a hundred copies
of a basic picture; then a change in the basic picture would im¬
mediately be shown In all hundred places. Or you could expand
your picture until It was effectively the size of a football field
(with you looking at a tiny view In the handkerchief-sized screen).
Or you could draw meshing gears on the screen, and with the light-
pen (and through the "constraint" facility) make one gear turn by
turning the other!

This elegant technique, the constraint .does not seem to have
been imitated even now. A "constraint" was a restriction placed
on some part of the overall stored picture complex. The user
could move or manipulate various parts of the picture on the screen,
but the parts that had constraints could only move in certain di¬
rections, or according to certain formulas, or dragging other
parts along, etc., as specified.

ThiB was a profound Idea, because It meant that any rules for
the manipulation of particular objects on the screen could be added
to Sketchpad as particulars within the larger program, rather than
having to be programmed In from scratch.

(One extremely interesting aspect of Sutherland's thesis, which
most people seem to have missed, dealt with displaying a structure
of constraints : that is, showing what elementa depended on what
other elementa, in a highly abstracted diagram that the system could
show you. This form of display haa remarkable possibilities.

After his brilliant SKETCHPAD work, Sutherland waa made head
of ARPA’s computer branch (see "Military," p. S9 ). There he was
Involved in many of the computer funding decision# of the late
sixties, which contributed to the Impetus of computer display.

(His predecessor, Lickllder, had been a pioneer in time-sharing, and
much of the forward movement in the cosrputer field In recent years
may Just have had to do with the strategic position of those two men
when they were at ARFA/IPT.)

Sketchpad went on as a continuing research tradition at Lin¬
coln Labs. Timothy Johnson, for instance, made a version of it that
allowed the drawing of three-dimensional objects; this became the
forerunner of the various three-dimensional line systems described
hereabouts.

From ARPA. Sutherland went on to the University of Utah,
whence be slipped off with the Computer Science department chair¬
man to found the Evans and Sutherland Computer Company, makers of
the top-of-the-llne computer display systems (see P• «n d P >*

iutherland's work has shown an elegance and inventiveness
iruling in the field. (For Instance, I believe one issue ot
licatlons of the ACH had two unusual article# by him: one de-
Lng an eccentric "Chinese auction" system worked out for
»Ung use of a computer, which benefited users more than any
jus method; and the infamous "Great Wheel of Karma ar “ c “’
he compared the design of graphical computers to the Hindu
■ of reincarnation— If you keep adding desirable f *“^“ r **
tslgn, soon you have another program follower and snot e
In the same box— over and over.)

DM 24

How do computers make movies?

Well, first of all, computers do not make
movies unless thoroughly provoked.

In fact, only people make movies. But
computers, if sufficiently provoked, will do a
lot of it: enact the movie and photograph it,
frame by frame.

There is no single method.

All forms of computer display and computer
graphics may be used to make computer movies.

"Computer animation" is any method of mak¬
ing movies in which a computer successively
draws or paints the successive individual frames,
which may be done by any of the methods mention¬
ed in this book. Now, since there are numerous
methods of making pictures by computer, then any
method of making different individual pictures,
in a succession of changing frames, is computer
animation. So a "computer movie" is any film
made by, or with the picture-making aid of,
computers.

In other words-- it’s no one thing.

Now, there already exist hundreds, if not
thousands, of computer movies. So far most of
them have been on technical topics-- the mecha¬
nics of satellite orbit stabilization, the
mechanics of explosions and so on.

Here are a few stills from some other movies,
more humanistic.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Newman 5 Sproull, Interactive Computer
Graphics . McGraw, $T!T.

This is the textbook. Anyone
interested in computer display
should get this immediately.

An expensive journal. Computer Graphics
and Image Processing , comes from
Academic Press.

Sherwood Anderson,'* Computer Animation: A Survey.

Journal of Micrographics , Sep 71, 13-20.

Lists nineteen computer-animation languages
of that time.

Ken Knowlton, "Computer-Made Films," Filmmakers
Newsletter Dec 70, 14-20.

Instructions
for the desired
mouie enter the
computer as a
deck of punched
cards.

Vintage Knowlton , using BEFLJX.
(This language used the-COM quite
efficiently: dots were actually
out-of-focus letters. )

Vanderb^, > ..... . (

sSr h ry eh0i i C - influence of ‘

BEFLIX , which it grows from).

SOI

Lillian Schwartz

uuimj scH^erz

A talented artist with a feel for tech¬
nology, Ms. Schwartz has been working for
several years with Knowlton and others at
Bell Labs. Her films with Knowlton, mention¬
ed elsewhere, are marvelous. She now works
at a more permanent setup, a minicomputer
that runs successive images on a color TV
screen, employing a modified form of Knowl¬
ton’ s EXPLOR language. The work is immediate¬
ly viewable. This allows rapid film con¬
struction, not previously possible when the
work had to go through a slow animation
camera before she could see the result.

For Knowlton-6-Schwartz films contact: Martin
Duffy, AT&T, 195 Broadway, NY NY.

Schwartz & Knowlton. Using the EXPLOR language.
they make pictures and patterns scintillate and
grow together. (EXPLOR in some ways generalizes
Conway'8 Gone of Life ; see p.*jft and p.

JOHN WHITNEY

John Whitney is the ancestor of us all,
probably the first computer movie-maker. He
is also a gripping speaker.

In the forties, he built a special anima¬
tion stand-- using analog computers.

Deeply concerned with music, -Whitney has
in his images emphasized rhythmic and contra¬
puntal movement of shapes and lines.

Whitney films available from: Pyramid
Films, Box 1048, Santa Monica CA 90406.

John Whitney

Lillian Sclsjartz

(with Henry Magnuski; see p.

■)

DM 25

fcw spate's floKrv/

fly now there are dozens of computer anima¬
tion languages— perhaps hundreds. Each one em¬
ploys the techniques of animation which itB de¬
veloper wanted to use, tied together in the ways
that seemed appropriate to him . (See "Computer
Languages," p. 15, and note Knowlton’s various
animation languages, described nearby.)

One of the more influential animation systems
has been Ron Baecker’a GENESYS, a 2-dimensional
animation system programmed in the late sixties at
MIT's high-aecurity Lincoln Laboratory. (It used
the TX-2 computer, mentioned elsewhere in this
book.)

Baecker, a cheery and genial fellow, expressed
interest as a student in using the TX-2 for anima¬
tion, and was allowed to. The system he produced
has a number of lessons for us all.

GENESYS is a "Good-Guy" system,as discussed
on p. I 3 Meaning, in this case, that it is
easy to learn and simple to use. As argued else¬
where in this book, making computer systems clear
and simple is often hard for the programmer (and
may go against his grain), but is essential.

PICTURES AND MOTIONS

GENESYS makes the following simplifications
of your movie: all images are made up of dots.

They do not change as you watch; animation con¬
sists of the images either moving or being re¬
placed .

To create an image, you draw it onto the
screen with a lightpen or a tablet. (As in the
SKETCHPAD system; see p.° M 2.T.) Parts of.the
Image may be changed until you're satisfied.

Now, to create the animation, you do the
same thing. Each image can be made to move on
the screen; and the path of the motion may be
drawn on the screen, through the picture area.
Not only that, but the timing of the motion is
controlled through the same diagram, by the
spacing of the dots. (Baecker calls his control
diagrams p-curves .)

Lastly, sections of picture may be re-
by means of the control diagram (as
indicated in picture above).

. . Havln E created such an animated sequence,
which is stored in symbolic form in the com¬
puter ( digitally"), you can view it on the
screen, decide what you do and don't like
about it, and change any part of it.

J he / ele « ance of the system is this:
Baecker made everything work the same way,
through control by Bcreen diagrams. He simpli
fied the animation problem In a clear and simp

Bon now teaches in Canada
infe with PDP-lla. The results

and is
should

into work-
be fun.

LYNM s«irq

Lynn Smith is a young Boston artist
who has worked extensively with Baecker’s
GENESYS (see nearby). One result has been
a movie which should be an example to us
all: "The Wedding Movie for Bob and Judy.”
(Her Friends Bob and Judy were getting
married, so she made this movie, a few mi¬
nutes long and quite clever, to celebrate
it.)

This is my favorite example of how
computers should be used in the human
world; it says more on the subject than
any dozen articles.

(One question that remains unanswered
is how a system like GENESYS could have
been used for such a purpose, seeing that
most people in the field believe GENESYS
only rum on the heavily-guarded TX-2 com¬
puter. Regretfully, I can shed no light
on this here.)

OMs

are what you use to make computer movies.
Basically they consist of a CRT and a movie
camera in a box.

Mostly they are used to put text on
microfilm by computer, so generally they
are not connected to a computer but run
off magnetic tape.

This turns out to be very annoying if
you want to hook up the computer directly
to the COM, and make movies that fill the
frames spot-by-spot. For that you really
need your own movie camera and a minicompu¬
ter. (Movie cameras that can be made to
start and stop by computer are called "pulse
cameras" or "instrumentation cameras.")

The society for people who make Movies by
Computer is called UAIDE<• (Users of Auto¬
matic Information Display Equipment— an
obsolete title). It used to be a club just
for companies that owned COMs made by
Stromberg Datagraphix, but evidently it has
now cut itself loose and become a subsidiary
of the National Microfilm Association, 8728
Colesville Road, Silver Spring MD 20910.

(NOTE: for them as want to make color
movies, the two alternatives have been either
to have separate primary negatives combined
at a lab— the "old Technicolor" process¬
or to add a complicated color-filter box to
a COM or other CRT setup. Such things are
available commercially now, from Dicomed—
a whole Color COM.)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Computer Output Microfilm . $10 from National
Microfilm Assn., above. Lists available
COMs and service centers.

£ Computer
Output
Microfilm
devices )

frQI

Mui ^T^cic*

( Above ; i'LATO LSYt-SL
Anyuay, the word iteelf
goes through change* in
the Gone of Life (tee
P- ‘ft*, a* prog named
for the PLATO aye tern by
tktnny Sleator, and phota-

PLATO ta the world’s greatest computer display

system.*

Sone 500 users, st terminals around the world
(but mostly in Illinois), simultaneously tie up to
a big computer in Urbans, Illinois and savor instan¬
taneous pictorial and test deliveries on their bright
orange screens. Diagrams, explanations, tests and
even animation of a sort, flow almost without inter¬
ruption to the bright orenge screens sll over. The
system is extremely responsive: depending on what the
uaer is up to, its various programs can respond to
each pressing of s key, usually within a fraction of
a second.

While literature on PLATO is cnploua, it Is
hard to read and slightly sales-oriented. tut a f w
minutes' Intercourse with a PLATO terminal tuk.es
anyone an enthusiast for the system.

PLATO is the brainchild of Don Ritter, a L. of
Illlnola engineer who has devoted over a decade to
its creation. Michael Scrlven, no slouch himself,
has called Bitter "one of the great men of our time."
Bitsmr is also certainly one of the world's greatest
salesmen. A crew-cut, huggy-beer sort of a fellow,
he flies around the world demonstrating, lugging s
great terminal along. When you sign on the system
you may be informed that Bltzer la at that very mo¬
ment demonstrating In Paris or Tokyo. This "travel¬
ling dog and pony show," as PLATO staffers call it,
has created awe and excitement wherever it goes, and
where the awe has been strong enouf,' 1 to g. derate money,
Coere you will now find I'l.iTP terr-l -ala.

If you have a PLATO terminal— you presumably
being a school or other favored Institution— you can
in principle log onto PLATO from anywhere in the world,
Chough most terminals stay in one place. There is one
main network, consisting of a big Control Data compu¬
ter in Urbana (the model 6800; see p. ) with ten¬

drils extending out Into the phone system snd the
educational TV cable of the state of Illinois. When
the Urbana system Is "finished" and fully loaded, it
will have 1006 terminals; all are already spoken for .

The PLATO terminal Is a totally unique animal (see box),
manufactured (all too slowly) by Xagnavox, incorpora¬
ting a terrific plasma panel built by Corning- (The
pl.su* panel was Invented by Hitter, and even though
much of PLATO was publicly funded, he is reputedly
rich from it. We said he was s great politician.)

In term* of high performance for lot* of users.
Various system* (detoribed hereabout*) offer
more paver, but at huge ooet.

As a first taste of interaction
on a graphical couputer systeu, PLATO
can'be a thrilling ainU-opener-- es-
pec tally to people w.io think couuuters
can only behave loutisiily or through
printout.

PLATO Is a complect stand-alone system, with Its
own monitor program or "operating system" (eee p. *#5")
running on Che CDC 6800 computer all by Itself. It
does not run on any other manufacturer’s computers, or
simultaneously with eny other big programs. It com¬
municates only with PLATO terminals, no other, and
PLATO terminals, beceuee of their unusual deelgn, can
coreeunlcate only with It, partly beeauae of lta unus¬
ual deelgn and partly beeauae of lta unique 20-bit
Interface. (See diagram of PLATO terminal, box nearby.)

A PLATO terminal costs about $4000 and the price
seams to bs going up; $5000 In the next few years is
e popular estimate. But you can't just buy one. You
have to get on the waiting liat, and who ere you, any¬
way? There was a tlaw when almost anybody could buy
Into PLATO, but now that the eystem is unstoppable,
applicants are being acrutlnlxad.

Is it really unstoppable? Educational Tasting
Service, of Princeton, is conducting an elaborate Ef¬
fectiveness Evaluation of the PLATO system, prsstaebly
to decide whether it should live or die (on public
funds). But with so many cermtnala in the field al¬
ready and so many man-yeara already gone into its crea¬
tion snd Che leaking of materials for it (— the ghastly
term "authoring" seems likely to stick), it is hard
to bclitve PLATO could dls. Mot now.

Especially considering that two more systems ere
now being put together: sc Lowry Air Fores Base (Colo¬
rado) and Florida State University. That means there
will be whole other computers of the CDC 6000 series
running the PLATO Monitor and shepherding PLATO mater¬
ials to users at PLATO terminals, unconnected to Ur¬
bana, one for Lowry APB and one in Florida.

And It won’t end there.

Control Date, whose vested interest in the sys¬
tem (though they didn't pay for Its creation) is enor¬
mous, is said to be projecting

PtATO'e audio device permit*
the system to respond to the
user oith a spoken phrase,

•natch of meio, or whateeer
-- in a fraction of a tecond.

The magnetic diek ie forever
turning; compressed air shoots
the read-head to the required
track on the diek for the reply.

The hardware was designed by Bltcer. The soft¬
ware— that is, the underlying computer part , never
mind the contents to b« shown (slao regrettably called
"software” by many h«nd^— wee Initially leee stressed
by Bltrer, but eventually grew under the direction of
others. la particular, sn ex-biologlat named Paul
Tencsar (pron. "Tenter”) created its underlying TUTO*
language. (For sn introduction to computer languages
see p. 1ST and whet comae after.) The TUTTIK language
exists only on PLATO; and PLATO authors may only use
the TUTOR language, Paul Tenczar'i creation.

The TUTOR language can best be understood as
i react ton to CourssvrIter, another CAI language
offered by IBM on its 1500 Instructional Syet —,
Coursawrlter's
to enable non-computer people,
to create drllL-and-practiee Instruction
roughly of the type

Mow, Johnny, what Is 3 A 57

.necrucciooei oyer—,-*.
t e original latent woe unJUe
le, especially teachers, ~

Mi 4 10 Mo. 1

US Good: J »)<?«*- *y.rj.

Obviously, by changing the numbers snd pushing the
kid on types of problems tie hasn't mastered, the
computer can patiently bring students to mastery of
various simple skills, diagnosing weaknesses and
strsaalng the individual student's problems. The
difficulty la that attempting to extend this method
out of the very simple has great pitfalls and may
not even be worthwhile (eee pp. >»\ i$-i$).

0BE MILLION PLATO TERMINALS BY 1980.

Another sign in the wind: Montgomery Herd has one.

Mow, to call the PLATO system a "computet graph¬
ics'' system may seem somewhat odd to people who know
it in another guise, as a eye ten for Computer-Assisted
Instruction (called CAI). But as the author does not
like CAI In general, at least as it's been going—
see p.*5-;*— and rather likes PLATO, 1 prefer to des¬
cribe it as 1 prefer to see It.

Nevertheless, to understand PLATO properly we
had better consider what the peopla have been doing
in terms of what they think they have been doing, and
offer any amendments or restatements later.

"OPTIMIZED FOR CAI"

PLATO stands for "Programmed Logic for Automated
Teaching Operations," snd has been billed (snd sold)
ss a system for automated instruction.

It la, mast PLATO fanciers will tell you, "op¬
timized for instruction." ("Optimized," in computer
talk, means "just what somebody says you need for s
specific purpose.”) As with any system, the leaps of
faith between its basic design premises have become
lit by airport beacons; clearmlnded individuals with
alternate views have difficulty making themselves
understood to some PLATO enthusiasts. But the most
basic underlying feature of the system, INSTANT RES¬
PONSE, cannot be quarreled with. PLATO can respond,
as already mentioned, to a single key-pressing by a
user, almost Instantly; this feature is virtually im¬
possible. say, on IBM systems (but age^b^p. ).

This responsiveness is the system's greatest beauty.

Because of the need for high responsiveness, it
was decided that sll users had to have their partic¬
ular programs ("lessons") running in core at the same
time . That meant there would be no swapping (bringing
in materials from disk memory), which can bring morti¬
fying delays (if a lot of people need it at once); but
It also meant lessons have to be very small . Large
bodies of material, which would have to be moved in
from disk, are not allowed; thus each lesson Is basic¬
ally a little love-neat that must generate its own
action. Hence there is an emphasis on little programs
to respond various ways, rather than text which may be
read in quantity.

Partly because large amounts of text cannot be
shipped to the user, a little PROJECTOR Is In the ter¬
minal. It uses a tiny microfiche, or microfilm sheet,
small enough to fit in the palm of your hand.

If a PLATO author deems it necessary, he requires
for his lesson, not just the use of the keyboard and
plasma screen, bu$4 microfiche as well. The student
must put the microfiche in place when he starts the
lesson; signals from Urbans (or wherever) then Jump
the projected image among 256 different Images, in
response to what the student does.

Now, PLATO people are not doctrinaire about how
their system is to be used. The plasma screen can be
continuously showing little decorations along with
the teaching material. The microfiche could be show¬
ing irrelevant works of art or travel scenes. These
are all facilities at tha option of the PLATO author;
at hla beck and call, if he thinks his program or
lesson needs them. (But it's very bothersome to have
the microfiche made— an important difficulty.)

Every terminal has the screen, the keyboard,
and the projector. Other options may be added, how-

1. The touch panel . This is a transparent

window that goes over the plasma screen
and reports to the main computer whether
it has bean touched, and where. (This
allows illiterates, especially kiddies,
to use the system without typing.)

2. The audio disk. This allows the termi¬

nal to respond with sound, including
canned words, to the student. (It does
not actually synthesize the sound, as
discus fieri on p.DMJl.)

3. Tn* C'merul Lick . JL>t to Sn confused

with Pershing, this is a connector
socket that will send and receive data
from any other device— provided you've
got the right interface. This allows
all kinds of other devices, such as
piano keyboards, to bs used for student
input. Or output (like gum-bell machines.)

Anyway, Couraewritsr was promulgated by IBM
with the 1500 and thus suffered premature standar¬
dization before things had been thought out. IBM
is not to blame for CoursewTltcr’a deficiencies,
they were just trying to make s buck; but heesusc
s lot of scared people believed Coureevrlter wee
the way it had to be, the evolutionary improvement
usual for computer languages didn't have time to
occur. An egregious omission: Coursewrlter did not
allow the author much access to Che computer Itself.
That is, progress written for numerical calculation,
may, could not be brought into instructional mater¬
ials at a sophisticated level.

Tencxar's TUTOR changed all that. It has both
the virtues and defects of being original. Apparently
unlettered in computermen'a controversies snd dogma,
Tenczsr designed s language of great power and speed; &
le utterly strange to computer people . of fere various
brilliant features, and la In bom respects quite
irritating. It looks very simple to the user— but
beyond s few deceptively simple techniques, It ham
to be learned In considerable detail to do anything
Interesting. (See box, "J, If JdW t WtT", cwt r*jO

This talc has, of course, been simplified. Blt¬
zer and Tenczsr did not work alone, but rather were
leaders in a seething cosesunity of dozens of smart
people working like blazes, on the project. It hss
taken some fifteen years of Bitzer'e effort, and tens
of millions of dollars, to get the system where It la
now-- Ready end Working.

Project PLATO now extends far bayond lta original
domain. Originally a fairly tight nucleus at the
Computer-Based Education Research Laboratory C'CERL”)
at the U. of Illinois in Urbana, the comunlcy of PLATO
now sprawls out through its lines to a larger constit¬
uency, the PLATO community of ueere.

(Indeed, this extended Republic of PLATO— the
systems people (zee p. f?) in Urbana, the authors
snd locsis-in-charge throughout the network— consti¬
tute one of the maddest rookeries of computer freaks
in the world. Where else would you find a 14-year-old
systems programmer who's had his Job for two years?
Where else would you see people fall in love over tha
Talkamatlc (a PLATO program which allows you to have
written conversations with people at other terminals,
wherever they may be) only to clash when et last
chey meet In person? Where elec can you play so many
different games with faraway strangers? (See Box.)
Where else can students anywhere in the network sign
into hundreds of different lessons In different sub¬
ject# (most of them Incomplete)? Where else are peo¬
ple working on various different programs for elemen¬
tary statistics, sll to be offered on the some sys-

PLAT0 Is one of the wonders of the world.

Hike O'Brien, a Tolkien fancier, ha*
put the entire Elvish alphabet onto
PLATO a* a special character*-**t.

Here the system give» a fanout naming
to turn back, both in Bngliah and
Elvith .

Hike toy* it intimidate* tnooper*
poking around hi* material.

Unfortunately, there are so many learners, and
so few PLATO terminals, that use of the terminals must
now be fairly strictly controlled. (The eight terminals
ac the University of Illinois st Chicago Circle, st
which moat of these pictures were taken, generally work
sn eight-hour day.) The time was when people could
just walk in, alt down at a terminal and do what they
liked; now, aedly, each usar must have an “account"
and a password.

But the rabble is howling at the gates. Many
professors want to use It to take rote aspects of
teaching off chair backs; snd the computer bias and
students want to play tha PLATO games (sec box) and
tlnkar with an interactive syacea of Its power and
lusclousness. But most of them will have to wait.

PLATO'a services art "free, 1 ’ for now. That la.
If your school has PLATO terminals, and IF it will pay
for the com mun ications lines, THEN the services of
the central computer are "free"— Che National Science
Foundation is bankrolling its operation for a couple
of yeare more. Then, bango, PLATO central aarvlce be¬
comes something that has to be paid for too.

Actually, except for the restriction on quan¬
tities of material chat can reach the student, PLATO
la an extremely general system. Despite the strange
convention of calling sll user programs “lessons";
despite the odd stipulation that all users sre called
either "studerts" or"authors"; and despite being told
by PLATO spokesmen that PLATO is not a general-purpose
eystem; actually, it Is.

Among*t the terminal*, PLATO room,
Cirol* Carpus. I/hat one per eon
ie doing ordinarily ha* no bearing
on the other*, oho could a* u tell
be in Timbuktu a* far a* the main
oatputer it concerned.

Just to give you sn Idea, the coeesii n lcatloo costa
to Urbana for Circle r aapui'i eight terminals ran at
ever $10 .000 a year . But these costs should bs com¬
ing down sharply; it is the pries of tooling up for
whatevar the PLATO future le going to be. Anyway,
the gantral coat of the system comae out to ebout
$1.50 an hour, the same as general tlme-aharlng on e
PDP-10 (aae p. >)£). But that's without paying for
the central computer— another coat which we expect
to go down, however.

This ia all a far cry, of course, from Bitser'a
claim a decade ego that PLATO terminals would cost
only $400. But considering tbs system’s success, we
needn’t dwell on that.

F«rh*pa the reel question la thl»: with ■**»-
machine intercourse of this quality now poaalbla,
can paople's lova for tha ayatam stay Platonic?

They work herd and they play hard on the mighty
PLATO sys tern.

When the Author gets tired of Authoring, or the
Student of Stewing, Just around the corner, a few
keystrokes away, are diversion* and game* to boggle
the Imagination.

You can go to a program ( M 1«t*on ro*e" ) and
look at "the great rosei”-- elaborate curlicue* gen¬
erated by mathematical pattern* that appealed to the
author* of that program; or find, also tueked In rose ,
Conway‘* Came of Life (*ee writeup, p. . end pier
ture series, nearby).

Then there are game* you can play against the
system, like racetrack and blackjack . (These game*
let you win astronomical sixes of money-- play money,
forgotten when you sign off.) Remember, of course,
that you're not really playing against a compute r but
against a specific program , with its quirks and
shortcuts and blind spots.

Then there are game* you play by yourself --
aceually responding resources (see fp. a* it-tt) . which
entice you into trying things out. Tenczar himself
has created two elegant, gem-like lessons, man and
plcto , Which teach you con^uter programing without
ever - saying so. These two programs present the user
with a little picture of a man on the screen, and
show him hiw the little man may be moved around and
made to pick up pictures of balls. From there on
the student nay have his way— and is never told that
he's learning to program a true computer language.
(Though it Is a quite restricted one, dealing ex¬
clusively with little men and their excursions among
balls and falling sticks)

Another charming gama, I don't know by whom, It
cal lad candy factory . Hera too the user may control
the animation of the pictere by what ha typas. Ma¬
chines are teen to manufacture candy, box It and
ship it-- dapanding on what buttons you pres*.

Some games are played between people who sit
together before a single PLATO terminal, often with
teaching Intent. Such game* Include the hop game ,
where Bunny (you) end Frog (your frI end) add the Ir
way along a board with numbered squares. Older chil¬
dren can dig How the West Was (l*2)X ) , which Involves
grouping the numbers you get by chance to try to get
ahead of the other stagecoach.

THE "BIG BOARD" GAMES

Still another category of games, though, asfaits
the adult who craves real excitement. Because PLATO
has so many terminals, all over, there Is a curious
combination of anonymity and Intimacy between users
(— much like the curious Nonexistent Phone Numbers
of Paris; In the French phone system, people calling
the same nonexistent phone number can talk to each
other; strange blindfolded encounters occur et the
Number of The Day, spread by word-of-mouth; sometime*
the»e result In people really getting together...)...

r>Ul

View frem your Nova epaoethip in-
eludes perspective t Hsu of wh ere
you are among billion* of stare;
and your various control*.

at the other guy by specified angles as you stand
among craters). In addition, PLATO offers (not during
working hours) what must be two of the ro*t baroque
space-war games anywhere, empire (eight races (the
Vulcantans, Kllngoni, etc.) seek to control the gal¬
axy) and nova (simulated navigation among millions of
different stars and solar systems, all of which my
be revlsi ted , all of which are different,..)

The navigation part of nova is
already working. To get around
you need instruation; here we
are at the Training Center.

Anyway, the Big Board games of PLATO have exac¬
tly that: a shared list, or "Big Board." showing who
Is playing the specific game.

But you don't have to use your right name.

In this jaunty society of shadows, you pick your
own ncxTi de guerre , or fighting name. This has num¬
erous advantages: the most obvious is that as you Im¬
prove at play, you can shed the Identity In which you
have been humiliated.

The main games with Big Boards are that old
standby, spacewar (rocketshlps wheeling and firing
at each other and sliding around on the screen);
dogfight (biplanes wheeling and firing at each other
and sliding around on the screen), moonwa r (shooting

People who only play PLATO games occasionally
have to sign on.by typing their names Into the big
board. (They often get slaughtered by the regulars).
The regulars-- hah. When they're signed Into the
system, they have merely to jump to a specific game
for their flghtln' names to be pasted on the big
board. A mighty rollcall they make, too-- such great
warriors a* yon Dave, zot, fright pilot, AL 9000,
simpson, doc-, THE RED BARON, The Red Sweater, The
Giant Pud, Fodzilla, tigress, enema salad, Conan,
Siddhartha, wonder pig::!!:, and EXORCIST.

(As those insiders who have automatic sign-on
to Big Boards write programs to do the sign-on, their
arrival in a Big Board game Is often an animated
sign-on. The cutest trick Is THE RED BARON'*; it looks
like this.

THE RED BARON U.-j ...

It works like this. For dogfight , the terminal al¬
ready has stored In its temporary memory, as "char¬
acters," the little pictures ®f airplanes that arc
going to buzz around the screen. So the Beron just
follow* his name with the code for that Special char¬
acter.)

One last point. No longer can you sign on with
an obscenity: a little obscenity-checking program
looks for the usual expletives, in case visitors or
other priggish folk might be tooking. But of course
thla is easy to circumvent by putting periods between
the letters of your nasty word, or something similarly
deceptive to the poor prograig.

Tftt ^tpdTD’^e WPlato

The PLATO keyboard.

What looke odd and arbitrary to you is believed by devout Platoniate
to be divinely ordained.'

PLATO IV- STANDARD KEYBOARD

■D®®ii]EH 0000 ranfflnH

□■ 0000000000 BBOSB

■■HfflEESEBSSmmHM

TO MOVE BETWEEN LESSONS, the basic action ie to hold down SHIP? and
preet STOP. (For further complication* see Ine-And-Oute diagram.)

TO MOVE UTTBIH A LESSON, basic actions are NEXT (to go forward or
tell the system it’s its turn; BACK, which sometime return* you to
earlier points in the sequence of your lesson; and six step-out-of-line
options, by which the author may permit the user to sidestep to ex¬
planations, enrichment material, or things out of sequence.

FUTO'i IHPUC.it STKyd-TURe -r 'FAMTit (J«c p. )

(iS- »* u»«- I'wi* f»f|.T> ct iO T*»>| **«. '■■\ Ur k»m4s ,4 kt

-Wj

K»1bru.[; o fr«vi»us cyeA.^ «<r ppj.W,

V . WGU IQ 06 <2 003X0 BAOUSnCS.

tn which NEXT and BACK Would be the forward and back control*. and
the other six would represent Help for the Confused, a "Lab” allowing
experiments, and additional Data the student decides he needs. The
with Shifts singly provided a second option of each type*

the author night use these, however, was hie cun affair.

”TEBM” evidently was for when students wanted things Looked Up: bu
pressing TEOt and typing the unknown word, the student would get a
da/instion. AAS suggested that it might also be used when the
etudent was allowed the option of being told the answer.

OU ‘ r ^E.A.D Z.X.C. They allow the student to move
waora, draw, point directions, etc. Unfortunate confusion ensues

•np^Zvf 7°™ ^ ** ^ Uftj ^ ^ rcrmdn ^ (aa *« Mi

MASfaZIowa the student to correct his input; COPT helps edit and
SUP and SUB alia; superscripts and subscripts;

JW *i. CK> U a 'P*™ 1 i hift ***’ 9° in e inl ° whatever special
font i, currently stored on the terminal. I have no inkling of what
txttls squars mans.

IS irBems.T© t*ot?

"A tutor who tooted the flute
Tried to tutor two tutors to toot.

But he asked through hie snoot:

is it better to toot
Or to tutor two tutors to toot?"

Polk thing

The TUTOR language grew out of drill-and-
practlce, for which it haa a coemand specifying
where a atudent'a answer is to appear on the
screen. This is the “arrow* comand. The lan¬
guage has a strange scanning structure built
around this "arrow* command, much as the TRAC
Language (see pp. 10-21) has a scanning struc¬
ture built around parentheses and conus. Be¬
ginners don't need to understand the scan and
the arrow coemand, but journeymen do.

TENCZAR'S CONCEPT OP A CONCEPT

Much has been made of TUTOR'S facility
for "analyzing the content" of what students
type in. Actuaily, of course, the computer
does not “understand" what the student saya
(see "Artificial Intelligence " i* - •’(),

but rather offers certain efficient tricks to
the person using TUTOR to prepare presenta¬
tional materials.

Basically, TUTOR’S "concept" facility
reduce^ every input word to a 60-bit code .

The technique of reduction (called a "hashing
function") supposedly substitutes for any
word of any language a code of 60 bits (see
"Binary Patterns," p. 33), which means the
program in TUTOR can rapidly test a student's
input for numerous different possible things.
(The power of this technique will be readily
recognized by computer people; unfortunately
there is no room to explain it further here.)

Thus a TUTOR program may contain “concept
searches" that test whether a student types
either a desired response or numerous alter¬
natives. While it may be strange to call
this a "concept," it is a powerful technique.

Paul Tenczar's TUTOR language, the pro¬
graming language inside PLATO, is like any
other programming language (see pp. 15-31}j
intricate, and unlike its results. That is,
a program bears no more resemblance to what
it does than the word "cow" looks like a cow.

PLATO is a system for canned presentations
that respond to the student. Students need
not know TUTOR. Anyone out to prepare such
presentations must learn it, however; end the
attempt has discouraged many.

Tenczar is a former biologist, and had no
preconceptions from coeputer orthodoxy to bind
him in the design of TUTOR. Thus the lan¬
guage is very original. There is only room
to raise the following points:

To learn the first steps in TUTOR— how
to set up drill-and-prectlce lessons, for in¬
stance— is unusually easy.

To do anything copies, however, requires
you to learn the bulk of the TUTOR language.
Thus when people say TUTOR is "easy," they
mean those first steps.

TUTOR is not Extensible, like, say, TRAC
Language (see pp. 16-10) or CRASS (see p.**^ ) .
That is, a progrxmer cannot customize the
language with new compound functions of hie
own making. Steps are being taken to correct
this; meanwhile, it is said that the Urbans
people can be persuaded to put in new coe man d■
others want for, e.g., chocolate chip cookies.

Ttt-r Gtrztc&'Y'l'Z. V -

TrtfcCAVfc OF
TWO.

kr-r .

fl¥To Tucr uiFj)

•t C.O-H ivt)

H^kttr ON TM C WHL

lM\c h nc.r««.«•.

8-r P'fk-i* k*«r

i-»Wi Kg V: Kcy)- 11 *

T ( o*.l) -
J7*wi f ••■

You esn read the standard-size lettering off

the screen et SIX FEET— even though it's
NO BIGGER THAN PICA TYPE. Fantastic.

The internal circuitry that draw* on the screen

Is highly capable. Receiving a 20-blt code,
the terminal itself deciphers It n—

A LINE ON THE SCREEN, or

TWO STANDARD CHARACTERS ON THE SCREEN

from its FIXED character memory, or
TWO SPECIAL CHARACTERS ON THE SCREEN

from Its CHANGEABLE character memory
(which can be Loaded with Russian,
Armenian, katakana, Cherokee or what¬
ever— even little pictures — at the
start of the lesson), or
A COMMAND TO THE MICROFICHE PROJECTOR, or
A COMMAND TO THE AUDIO PLAYER, or
A COMMAND TO WHATEVER'S IN THE GENERAL JACK.

Note that all lines and characters for the plasma
screen can be turned on (oTange on black) or
off (black on orange).

PLATO'S HANDY KEYBOARD is
flexible cable, can be t
in your lap.

AUTHOR'* NATO -SHCE w)

o</t«j jiti sjftK.

It tmtr. 'M<s,' r »*« V.)

>50

three-dimensional line displays

1 *

A‘W>)

et*,

So far we've discussed the two-dimensional
subroutining displays- However, things do not
by any means stop there. A number of people
in the early days experimented with technique*
for drawing line pictures by program; the ear¬
liest of these used plotters , output devices that
let the program draw with a pen. But interest
soon grew in the possibility of interactive three-
dimensional displays on screens. Johnson's
Sketchpad 4 did this entirely by program. But
as night follows day. people set about putting
these techniques into hardware , creating devices
that would automatically show things in three-
dimensional views-- allowing the viewer to
rotate views of nonexistent objects as if they
were on unseen turntables .

The views wc are talking about, now, co
sist of bright lines on a dark field, and so the
"objects" wc arc talking about are called "wire¬
frame" objects-- they could effectively be made
of welded wire. But now wc do not have to
build them physically to see them.

Actually Adage had a tremendous lead in
this field, but they let it slip for some reason,
and have now lost II to two firms: Evans and
Sutherland on the high end, Vector General on
the low end. (But of course things keep chan¬
ging.)

The Evans and Sutherland Computer Com¬
pany was founded In 1966 by Ivan Sutherland,
creator of the masterful Sketchpad system, and
David Evans, chairman of computer science at
the University of Utah. (For a time both held
appointments at U 2 at the same time, but now
both have left the university to devote full time
to their dream factory in Salt Lake City.)

Their first producl was an extraordinary
piece of hardware called the LDS-1, which they
said innocently stood for Line Drawing System.

(To anybody from Utah, however, LDS means
Latter-Day-Saint, and don't you forget it. Evans,
indeed. is a Mormon, but I’ve been told it may
have been Sutherland's sense of humor that
chose the acronym.)

It should be pointed out that a special ad¬
vantage of digital perspective calculation is that
viewed coordinates can be read back by the com¬
puter, and serve as new data, if you go for
that sort of thing.

Basically a three-dimensional system of
this type stores the lines as coordinates In threes:
endpoints of lines in a mythical three-dimensional
space. Each point’s location in the space is told
by three numbers (example showing a house
may be seen on p. ): a line in a space is
represented in the data structure by two such
points, and a code or something tying them to¬
gether.

The second program follower in such a
device behaves much as it does in the 2D system,
but with certain additions. Like the 2D system,
it proceeds down its own program one step at
a time. Like the 2D system, it finds in its
program the coordinates of a line to display and
creates electronic signals representing its end¬
points. But it does not display these directly,
since these are three-dimensional coordinates.

Instead it routes these signals to what we may
call a view calculator , a particular piece of hard¬
ware that has been primed with the angle from
which you want to view the object. This view
calculator, automatically and by mysterious means
which vary among machines, produces the view,
and its signals go to the screen.

Let's say we want to display a point. The
display's program follower pulls three numbers
from Us display list and notes the code that says
it's a spatial point and not the end of a line.

These three numbers slide on into the view cal¬
culator, already primed with the angle of rota¬
tion: and the view calculators figgers where on
the screen that point should be displayed . The
coordinates for the screen-- telling where the
point goes in the desired picture-- go to the
screen controller, and the point is brightened.

How are these coordinates calculated?

Well, some commercial units do it electronically
("in analog") and some do it symbolically ("in
digital"). The result is the same.

flf you want the equations for this, they're
in the Newman and Sproull book.)

Then how does the view calculator handle
a line? Same thing.

The program follower pulls three numbers
from Us display list and notes the code that says
it’s a line, so it lakes three more. Then the
view coordinates of both points are calculated
and fed to the screen controller. The screen
controller now has two points on its screen—
so it draws a line between them

The first device of this type was. I think,
the so-called kludge (pron. "Klooj"— computer slang
for a ridiculous machine, but in this case applied
affectionately) built at MIT's Electronic Systems
Laboratory in the early sixties. This device was
a one-of-a-kind, built out of DEC circuit cards and
hooking to a bigger machine. The ESL Kludge showed
vividly how good It was to have instantaneous view
calculation under a user's control.

The first of these systems to be offered
commercially, 1 believe, was the "Adage Display,"
made by Adage, Inc. of Boston, which uaed their
unusual Ambilog computer (see p. ^3) to rotate
objects on the screen. 1 vaguely recall that it
cost about $80,000 with computer but without ac¬
cessories .

INTERACTIVE ROTATION

3D scraans— as Ida from their fun and excits-
mant— allow people to understand and work with
complex JD structures without having to build them
physically.

The underetending, however, comes from being
able to turn and manipulate the structure on the
screen. If you can't turn it you cen't really
perceive the 3D structure, because the arrangement
of lines could be anything.

However, system ,n<l the Vector

General and the Evans mr.-Tl md devices allow

you to turn things on the screen ae easily as if
they were on turntables behind a pane of glass.
That's how you see, you see.

This Interaction is what make* computer dis¬
play augur a new era for mankind, if we're lucky.
(It’s also why we use the term computer display
in this book, rather than "computer graphics,"

Since people who make computers draw with pens are
also doing "computer graphics"— a related activity,
but not one to change the world.)

-V— V-

The Adage Display is isometric . meaning
that lines do not get shorter as they get farther
away or longer as they get closer. While this
is marvelously impressive, most people want
real perspective: and it was this that Evans vd
Sutherland set about to make available in real
time, i.e., in direct response to the viewer's
actions.

The LDS-1. weighing in at half a million
dollars or so, buckled to the PDP-10, a big
36-bit computer from DEC (see p. 4 O ). Its
view calculator worked symbolically (digitally),
and thus could work to the higher precision
necessary for true perspective calculation.

Among the exciting demonstrations that
you can see sitting at an LDS-1 are a map of
the United States you can zoom in on, bringing
you in to a map of New Jersey, then Atlantic
City, then a specific intersection, all in one
smooth continuous motion. Also a simulated
landing on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier
-- with you flying the airplane, so you can
go over it, to the side, into the drink or straight
at the carrier. In all cases the ghostly ship
will move, turn and change perspective on the
screen as if somehow it were really there.

Several LDS-ls were sold.

Meanwhile a little new firm of young guys
in Southern California, Vector General, came up
with a line of terminals like the Adage line, ex¬
cept that they could buckle to the 16-bit minicom¬
puter of your choice. (In practice most of them
have been attached to PDP-lls; see p. HL.)

The Vector General display is isometric,
and makes its calculations in analog, like the
Adage Display. It has been very successful a-
mong both universities and private corporations.

In addition, a highly interactive and well-
designed language is available for the creation
of data structures representing 3D objects, as
well as for general-purpose programming and the
creation of whole environments. And it's free
to individuals or companies that have Vector
General displays attached to PDP-lls. (See
"Coup de GRASS," p.>\3/.)

But wait. Evans and Sutherland has now
dropped the LDS-1 and given us-- no. not LDS-2,
but something called The Picture System— also
built onto the PDP-11, but this one works sym¬
bolically (digitally) and in full perspective. The
price starts at eighty grand.

Since the Picture System works out of the
PDP-11 core memory, the commands it follows
are 16 bits long, since that's the size of a slot
in PDP-11 core. But wail. They've designed
the thing to convert to 36 bits , so that coordin¬
ates are moved to a private store or buffer be¬
tween the program follower and the display.

This means the display can zoom and zip around
in the scene without bothering the computer.

UNFORTUNATELY, just to get through the basics,
there is only room to discuss stick-figure
graphic display here. But curved surfaces
may also be depicted, though usually not inter-
actively. See below, and pp. 5^3?

h Wit,

taf flr.

Drawing by Ruth Weiss' BE VISION program,
done st Bell Laboratories, old-slxtles.
(©Walt Disney Productions.)

This program represented truly curved
surfaces in its data structure, as
"quadric surfaces"— that is, invol¬
ving powers of two in the math— and
calculated the visible lines tangent to
the edges from the viewpoint, thus draw¬
ing the edges. Removing the hidden
parts of the curves is of course one of
the greatest problems. (From Ruth A.
Weiss, "BE VISION." JACM Apr 66. 194-
204, p. 201.'

Another important feature of The Picture
System: it will do, not just ordinary perspective,
out such weird view calculations as wideangle
barrel distortion, pincushion distortion and
similar stuff.

Courtesy
V. of Utah

The rules of perspective have been under¬
stood since the Renaissance, in olden computer
times (up till about 1965) people used to do
three-dimensional view calculation by angles
relative to a three-dimensional data structure.
Then Larry Roberts at MIT noted that there was
a more appropriate mathematical method. Long
moldering in obscure texts. The idea is this:
if you add an extra dimension to the data , it's
easier to program. It's easier because it be¬
comes a simple matrix multiplication, which has
no commonsense explanation but is important to
mathematicians.

SO that means that to calculate views of
three-dimensional objects, the most usual way
is now to add that extra dimension. Instead of
having a point in space whose position is 36-24-
36 (in some set of three-dimensional coordinates),
another arbitrary number is added to make it,
say. 36-24-36-1.

It seems that in the mathematics of multiple
dimensions, it comes out simpler that way. In¬
deed, from a mathematical point of view the new
improved dimension is just like the other three .
For this reason, such an augmented system of
coordinates is called homogeneous coordinates .
Like homogenized milk, Ihe additional coordinate
is just stirred in with the rest, and out comes
your desired view calculation. (The formulas
are to be found in Newman and Sprouil. Princi ¬
ples of Interactive Computer Graphics , McGraw.
$15, your basic text on the subject.)

At any rate the additional coordinate is
often referred to, incorrectly, as the "homogen¬
eous coordinate." They're all homogeneous,
which is why it works.

M 31

kW (©op k GRASS

impudent and plucky Tom DeFanti was an assist¬
ant professor at 24. This in part because he has
created one of the world's hottest 3D graphics lang¬
uages, which he calls CRASS. (He says it stands for
CRAphics Symbiosis System— also, he says, it Turns
You On.)

Tow’s GRASS language is an excellent beginner's
computer language for two reasons: first, it is easi¬
ly taught to beginners, and second, it is about things
of interest to beginners, i.e., pictures and graphical
manipulation on screens. (But compare the three be¬
ginners' languages presented briefly on pp. 16-25.)

A prototype for the system was developed at Ohio
State, on a project directed by artist Charles Csuri.
Tom had a free hand, though, and the language design
is his; but much of the specific coding was done by
Gerry Moersdorf, and the graphics algorithms and ro¬
tation were programed by Manfred Knemeyer. Inspira¬
tion was furnished by Maynard E. Sensenbrenner.

GRASS runs on the PDP-11, a splendid minicomputer
(Ton's is shown on p. 36) and is specifically designed
for the control of three-dimensional stick-figure dis¬
plays on the Vector General display system (see p.

DM \0 ). But a lot of people have wrestled with these
matters and not done as well. Let's consider:

H. The language is extensible , meaning that the
user may create new commands in the language « programs .
These conroands, however, may be used in later programs

as if they were built into the language itself.

I. The system is completely general-purpose. Many
graphics languages are not, being restricted only to
their original purpose. This is more difficult, but oh,
so much more worthwhile.

3. ITS DEEP GENERALITY. Things should be versatile,
and able to be tied together in many different ways. This is
what we mean by "generality;'' and this kind of generality can
make a system very powerful. (The term in mathematics is
"elegance.") As is said on the other side of the book, com -
pllcatedness is not generality or goodness or power, but a
sign of the designer's shallowness.

Anyway, GRABS has this kind of generality. It has a
great number of facilities, growing weekly, and they all tie
together in clear and predictable ways, without exceptions.
Rather than create special functions which cannot be tied to¬
gether, Young Doctor DeFanti has chosen instead to make the
separate desirable functions part of a simple and clear lan¬
guage. (A note to you elegant types: GRASS is fully recursive
As a nice example, Dan Sandin (see p.J>h&) wrote a program to
display Peano lines that was under forty GRASS instructions
long. It is also astonishingly reversible: you can watch it
uncreate the Peano line, straightening itself backward.)

In the more usual sense, DeFanti's language is not
the 'most advanced'; there are more powerful 3D systems
than the Vector General (the LDS-1, see p.J>M)o, offers
true perspective), more elegant user-level languages
(see TRAC Language and APL, other side), true halftone
(the Watkins Box); yet his achievement on close examina¬
tion is extraordinary. Never mind his age, the more eso¬
teric features of his system (full recursiveness, etc.)
or the fact that he does not seem to have made one mis¬
take, which is infuriating. Consider only this: TOM DE¬
FANTI 'S 'GRASS' LANGUAGE IS PERHAPS THE ONLY SYSTEM THAT
CAN BE TAUGHT IN A FEW HOURS TO COMPUTER-NAIVE BEGINNERS
THAT PERMITS FULL THREE-DIMENSIONAL ANIMATED INTERACTIVE
GRAPHICS WITH TREE-STRUCTURED DATA.

1. ITS CLEAR SIMPLICITY. Tom believes computers
are for everybody; he is not a high priest bent on mak¬
ing things obscure (see "Cybercrud," p. 8). Thus he
made his language as sensible, clear and easy to learn
as possible. Tom likes to stress the concept of "habit¬
ability" (a term of W.C.Watt), meaning the coziness of a

2. ITS GENERALITY. Refining and condensing the
basic ideas of a system is the hardest part of the de¬
sign. DeFanti made several interesting decisions.

A. The internal form of the language is
ASCII code (see p. ). In other words, you f»*i
read programs in their final GRASS form.

Ton DePanti

B. For a three-dimensional system such
as the Vector General, the main form of data
structure is the three - dimensional object — a
list of points and lines in space. This is the
form of data GRASS uses for most purposes.

C. In the design of such a system you
want larger 3D objects to be buildable out of
smaller ones. This ingslies arranging data

in tree structures (see p. I 1 ) ) . You also
want to be able to make things do compound mo¬
tions on the screen— for example, showing an
airplane flying around on the screen with its
propellor spinning; this too implies a tree struc¬
ture. There are some programmers who would use
different tree structures for both objects group¬
ed together and for movements grouped together;

Ten uses one.

D. Objects shown on Tom's system can also
appear to move on complicated paths through three-
dimensional space. In Tom's system, such a path is
merely another object . It seems obvious when you
say it, yet this kind of simple generality is ex¬
actly what many programmers seem to avoid. (Note:
this facility is a generalization of Baecker's p-
curve; see p.!M5).

E. Input devices are completely arbitrary and
programmable. What happens on the screen can be con¬
trolled by anything— any variable (see p. J&» ) in
the programming language. In other words, DeFanti
has decoupled the screen from any particular form of
control, allowing user programs to make the connect¬
ion between controls and consequences. This means
that, using Tom's language, it is comparatively easy
to build complex custom controls for any function.

(This is discussed under "Fantics,"* p-^Jj-5i.)

F. The language has string functions that allow
text handling. Since the language may also use con¬
versational terminals, it is eminently suited for
"good-guy" interactive systems for naive users, as
described on pp. 12-13.

G. Tom’s language is interpretive, like TRAC
Language (see p. 30). That means it is "slow" in terms
of the number of machine cycles required for it to do
each operation. However, DeFanti has added a "com¬
pile" feature to the language, so that for long macros
(sections of program) that have to run repetitively, moi
efficient compiled versions of the macros may be gene¬
rated.

I coined the term fantics , for the art and technology of
showing things, long before I ever heard of Tom DeFanti,
and I am not about to change it just because he is now my

70m UM OF fewermwus
oj>V 6 sj> attorn j>/snw

Much of today's impetus for 3D computer
display is coming from the field of chemistry.
University chemistry departments are buying
equipment like the Evans & Sutherland LDS-1,
the Adage and the Vector General.

Tom DeFanti. Shove part
of hemoglobin molecule.
Data structure from

Richard J. Feldmarin, NIH.

Why?

Because chemistry is increasingly invol¬
ved with complex three-dimensional structures.
Crystals, long folding chain molecules, minus¬
cule forces acting on structures whose shape
determines the outcome. Organic molecules
that involve thousands of atoms. and whose
complex folded structure exposes only certain
key features. And so on.

The Vector General display illustrated
here and there on these pages belongs to the
Department of Chemistry, University of Illinois
at Chicago Circle.

Bouknight & Kelley (see p.

Tha bast Feature of alls it's currently available.
PDP-11 ownere— even without Vector General dieplaya —
may inquire of: Tom DePanti, Doctor of Arte Program, Ulcc,
Chicago It 60600. '

so many have atumbled and failed?

I just learn frees other people's
cheerily.

mistakes,"

Frof. DePanti
‘>n the eyetem.

MISCELLANY:

Coupling his system with that of Dan Sandin (p. dm 9 )
has created the "Circle Graphics Habitat," described on p.

I hope I'm around long enough to write the GRASS lan¬
guage manual.

(DeFanti's GRASS is an ideal language for sooething like
the 3D Thinkertoy, described on p.^Sb . However, it doesn’t
have any provision for the storage of large complex data
structures, so the hard part would actually be working out an
adequate storage data structure and storage macros within
GRASS'S use of the DEC file system.)

SCREEN CONTROLS

The great thing about CRT displays is that they can be
used to control things b£ manipulation of picture;. Instead
of moving buttons or levers, you can seize parts of the pic¬
ture with the light-pen and move some part of the picture.
The computer, sensing the choice or adjustment you have made,
can then perform whatever operations you have directed.

Some samples:

T«CK.AOJTAr

= 4 *.

VotOMt

Tout

VUVE

co-nxeu

l°e%

or.

The design of screen controls— easy-to-use, clear and
simple controls for everything— is one of the frontiers of
computer graphics. (See "Panties," p.'fJ;5/o

DIMENSIONAL FLIP

3D scopes are about the best we've got-- so what do
we do about multidimensional phenomena?

One very good solution is to show a selection of thret
dimensions at a time, and provide for easy "flip" from one
dimension to another— so that instead of looking at some¬
thing on demensions A, B and C you are looking at it on di¬
mensions A, B and X.

For example, suppose you're a sociologist looking at
measurements of various traits among a group of people.

It's a cloud of dots in three dimensions— whatever three
dimensions you're looking at. Some could be: age, height,
weight, sex, ethnic background, premarital experience, ed¬
ucation... etc.

You view this cloud of dots, say, according to age,
weight and ethnic background. That means you can rotate it
around and see how many people in the group are what.

Using dimensional flip , however, you can change the
view as follows: rotate the box-frame till it becomes a
square to your eye. Then you hit the control that makes
the unseen dimension “flip" to another dimension that in¬
terests you. The cloud still looks the same— until you
rotate it, and the third dimension is now "premarital ex¬
perience.” So you can quickly get a view of how popula¬
tions are really divided up. (Note to sociologists: this
same operation, with stretching and clipping, provides a
visual technique for "partialing” operations of the
Lazarsfeld type.)

You can make a character change expression on a 3D
scope by making his mouth a twisted wire that can be
rotated between ’’frown" and "smile" positions. The
trick is the shape of the wire.

NOW GUESS WHAT; DeFanti's GRASS language is the best lan¬
guage I know of for doing all the above things.

friend and

#*\f i not fMcfW

A Series of Heviow Articles
Computer Decisions Magazine.

WHERE TO GET IT
Conpu

3D halftone systems are now available to movie
of source*. It tend* to coat a lot of money,
rcd'wlth normal Hollywood production expense*, it

SALES OF MACHINES.

Computer Image Corporati

for sale. See p. DM 39.

Evans and Sutherland Computer Corpo
offers the Watkins Box, a rea
us 1 or the Watkin* Method (see
also Gouraud pseudo-cur'

It costs about $500,000 anti
larRC computer; see p. 40).

tlon , Salt
time dlspl
ext page)
shading (see p
attaches to a

e City,

DM 37).
TDP-10

General Electric, Syracuse, offers three-dimensional scene

synthesis like that at the bottom of this page. Every
job Is custom. It’s done on videotape through programs
running on a smallish computer. Production costa,
after your data structures are all In, could run as
little as hundreds of dollars per minute (rather than
thousands) .

Contact; Charles P. Venus, General Electric Co.,
Building 3. Syracuse NY 13201, 315/456-3552. (Given
In detail because harder to reach than these others.)

Computer Visuals, Inc., Elmsford, NY. Offer more detail

than Gli system, and go straight to film without video.
More expensive: probable costs run in the thousands of
dollars per minute. Again, every job Is custom.

Contact: Nat C. Myers, president.

Dolphin Productions, NYC, has several Computer Image machines,
but their president, Allen Stanley, is interested in
eve rythlng.

Computer Image Corp., Denver and Hollywood, also offers servic
on their machines. On occasion they have been willing
to back film-makers, reportedly on a 50-50 basis. Their
president, Lee Harrison III, Is a swell fella.

Author's note . These articles were
written for Computer Decisions magazine, and
reflect the results of a lot of phone calls they
paid for. The first of these articles was pub¬
lished in 1971. The others have not been
previously published, as the editors and 1
were never able to get together on quite what
they wanted.

This is, to my knowledge, the only
existing collection and summary of computer
half-tone systems to date, and in some cases
the articles reveal more about the systems
than has been published anywhere. Sur¬
prisingly, even two years later they do not
seem out of date.

However, due to the editorial style of
Computer Decisions , and my own, this has all
come out extremely condensed, and phrased
in breezy and humorous ways not ordinarily
considered acceptable for serious technical
reviews. The hope is that they will supply
orientation to the browser, deeper insights to
the technically-minded, and further directions
for them as wants to pursue.

FIRST ARTICLE

General idea of 3-D halftone.

Polygon Systems.

halftone image
synthesis

My thanks to the publishers of Computer
Decisions and its editor, Robert C. Haavind,
for their encouragement, phone money and
permission to reprint this.

There are more ways than one
to produce shaded pictures with computer/.
Here are the methods
of the 'polygon school.’

b> Theodor H. Nelson

Tile Nelson Organization

To most people in the computer field, “computer
graphics ’ means line drawing—systems and programs
for mapmaking, pipe layout, automobile and aircraft
design, or any other activity where a diagram may
help. Using line-drawing programs and equipment,
designers may create line drawings on fast-re*.ponding
graphic screens, reworking their ideas until satisfied;
(he system then disgorges polished drawings and speci¬
fications for the designer's real intent, something else
that is to be made or done. But it is possible for a
picture itself—instructive, interesting or pretty—to be
the goal. In that case we will often want pictures that
look like things instead of wires. A picture that is not
all black and while we call "halftone.”

With much secrecy and a slow start, computer
halftone systems are now being built all over. The
methods are extremely different from one another;
only the outputs arc similar. Some exist in software,
some have already been built into special hardware.

These systems have many potential uses for visualiza¬
tion, animation and new kinds of photography, in
art, scholarship, motion pictures and TV; for visual¬
izing worlds lost and imagined, equipment yet unbuilt,
the responsiveness of aircraft. It may not be long
until moviemakers can buy different brands of picture
synthesizer, just as musicians choose today among
Moog. BucIila and arp music synthesizers. But none
is in pnxluction yet. This is an attempt to review the
coming apparatuses of apparition.

Not only is the field of halftone one of the most
exciting in computing; it is also one of the nuttiest and
most secretive. For instance, at one time a firm that
was supposedly marketing its halftone system declared
the present author persona non grata and not to be
communicated with in any way. though information
was freely available to others. "I don’t think it’s
necessarily paranoia." says Rod Rougelot of General
Electric. "A lot of guys started about the same time,
and proceeded in a heads-down manner." It took a
special kind of initiative to head off in that direction
with no external provocation. “All those heavy cats

from akpa and MIT were saying in the sixties I could
never do a Mickey Mouse,” says Lee Harrison ill of
Computer Image “But I’m not that kind of researcher.

I talk to Ihc Lord."

The systems' stories are as different as the systems
themselves. General Electric’s system grew out of
cockpit displays for blind flying. The system of Penn¬
sylvania Research Associates began with terrain and
radar modelling. The system of magi (Mathematical
Applications Group, Inc.) began with the study of
radiation hazards in battlefield machinery. Two system
families, that of Computer Image Inc. and my own
Fantasm, were designed from the beginning for movie¬
making, especially “special effects" and puppeieering.
The most poignant tale may be that of Lee Harrison,
whose struggling family was warmed through cold
winters by the tubes of their analog computer

Halftones in two dimensions

Two-dimensional computer halftone is not new.
Halftone pictures convened from photographs have
often been printed out on line primers, either for fun

(nudes often turn up at big installations), or in con¬
nection with some scientific problem, such as analyzing
chromosomes. Kenneth C. Knowlion, It Bell Labora¬
tories, has executed some well-known photo conver¬
sions making pictures into huge grids of tiny whimsical
symbols having different grey-values.

Various other systems have allowed users to create
their own original 2-D pictures. But the natural temp¬
tation is to want the computer really to make picture*.
Why not have the computer produce a photographic
picture directly from the 3-D representation of objects?
Computers don’t do this by nature, any more than
they do anything else by nature, so haw it may be
done by computer is very interesting. The problem is
also interesting because of its intuitive nature. Visions
of scenes in space are around us constantly, and we
intuitively understand the geometry of outlines and
light. As 3-D work progresses large problems are being
overcome. The famed "hidden line problem," for ex¬
ample, was misleadingly couched, since the problem
is not Finding what lines arc hidden, but what surfaces
are in front!

Computer graphics the ordinary way

Th* computer, as penman, draws lines
from a list stored in core memory. In i
three-dimensional system, the basic
list of 3-D coordinates is converted
to a list representing a particular
view: the result looks
like a wire frame.

3-D halftone system
Today'5 new procedures can use the
same data to make a realistic shaded
or halftone picture. The visible parts
of the obiects are ascertained by
programs or special hardware,
using the same 3 D coordinates as in
the ordinary systems. These visible
parts are then shaded according
to the appropriate color information.
The senes of shading-points makes the
picture on an output device.

COMPUTER DECISIONS

MAY 1971

General Electric will
system. These are from a I
the film was to explain to
function. Rather than use
stand how the sections wou
so on. For exposition of

make movies and videotapes for you with their pictorial synthesis
beautiful (really beautiful ) film they did for NASA. The point of
i everybody how a proposed space laboratory would be'built and would
1 diagrams, they enac ted it in the GE system, so viewer* could under-
ild be delivered and fit together, how the antennas would unfold and
that kind, nothing beats this kind of enactment.

Wc must draw on ihi* undemanding of scene* to
figure out how to mike picture*, for there is no
mathematically elegant or preferable approach Scene*
■re geometrically nch. and Ihu* many different tech¬
nique* may be used to extract picture* from them
The*e technique* may look at planar structure*. *patial
interconnection* relative edge* of intersection* or
anything else you can define and process I prefer to
think of computer halftone a* like trick photography
or the kind done in Hollywood: a variety of tech¬
nique* can he combined in various way* A* in trick
photography, the number of touche* and enhance¬
ment! that you add generally determine* how good
it will look, regardless of what system you begin with.

The simplest systems art those that depict object*
made of polygons—that is. plane* with straight edges.
We will discuss such system* in the present installment.

The wild polygon w>«d*r

At least two companies are building image system*
lhal will behave and respond like onroshmg reality.
Such a system, hooked to cockpit-like controls, can
show a trainee pilot the delicate and precipitous results
ol what he does Realistic action, rather than surface
detail, i* crucial

The techniques of action polygon halftone were
originally developed by General Electric, of Syracuse,
N Y., and are now also under development at Link
Division of Singer Company (maker* of the beloved
pilot trainer and its progeny). Basically »uch system*
operate upon the scan-lines that crisscross a television
screen, switching the color of the running scan a* it
crosses from polygon to polygon.

The action polygon school—GE and Link—take*
a curious but effective approach to halftone TV: their
"environments'' are composed entirely of convex object*
made entirely of convex polygon* To use only convex
objects (no dents) means that one object may be in
front of another or vice versa, but never both. (An
object with apparent indentations, such a* an airplane,
ha* to be made out of a group of convex object* Tying
together.) To use only convex polygons (noichlcss)
makes it easy for the system to decide, at a given
instant, whether the *can is crossing the polygon or not.

The edge-box report* summed into the facet boxes,
each of which was set to respond to a particular
combination of left-right, ahove-helow reports. At the
instant all the facet's edge boxes replied in the proper
preset combination, the facet box signalled lhat it*
own facet was heing crossed by the scan-line When
more than one lacet-box responded, the one nearest
the viewpoint hid its color pled to the screen.

Now Rnugelot's group i* replacing Ihc old NASA
*y*tcm by a new naxa system, which works on entirely
different principles, but keeps the vector calculator
The old one could show scenes with up to 240 edges;
the new nasa system will at least double that. GE'i new
method is already operational on smaller research fa¬
cilities. They don't tell what it is, but basically it in¬
volve* sorting by distance Supposedly the son method
ii good enough to make the old edge boxes obsolete

The Link group claims competitive performance for
their system, which will go lo black-and-white thou¬
sand-line TV. They say their system is different, belter.

Campus of Fooled U. {GE)

Mb *5

•ady to competa (Gary Watkins. Utah)

The method of Gary Watkins is the result of a
profound search at the University of Utah for the
method—a polygon technique fast enough for real¬
time enactment, but cheaper than the GE-type systems
and not subject to the convexity restrictions. They seem
to have found it.

Each video scan of the scene result* in a "slice''
through surfaces in the scene The two nearest surfaces
arc continuously compared to see which is closer, as
if by [wo rulers. The instant x new surface becomes the
Dearer one, the system makes it the visible one. TV
nearest surface always shows, down to the precise
instant two surfaces cross.

This work evolved in part from GE's work in the
fifties with a "ground plane simulator,” a system that
would show a correct representation of the ground's
position, dipping and rotating, to the pilot of an air¬
craft in fog or night In 1963 the General Electric
group, under Rod Rougelol, worked out for nasa the
design of an "environment simulator"—a device that
would simulate the appearance and performance of
any equipment. This is row called the "old nasa sys¬
tem. ' It permitted the user—seated before a color TV
screen—to work controls for an imaginary aircraft or
spacecraft, and sec roughly what the pilot of the craft
would see. flying in real lime through a breathtaking
color scene. Films made on this machine have been
stunning. Imaginary cities, roller coasters and aerial
dogfights are among the visions that can be presented.

General Electric s okl nasa method is fairly weird
if not mischievous. The earlier "ground plane simu¬
lator" had shown an edge 1 the horizon) digitally dis¬
played on a ert; the system was extended to many
edges, and the logical analysis of areas between them.

Wylie-Romney: shoot the works

The Wylie-Romney method, disclosed in 1967, was
the Tint generally publicized procedure for making
halftone pictures. Indeed, the 1967 publication sig¬
nalled the explosion of the University of Utah into
the forefront of computing research.

The Wylie-Romney method was actually the joint
work of Chris Wylie, Gordon Romney. David C. Evans
and Alan Erdali]; hut much of the impetus for its
development came from Evans, chairman of computer
sciences at Utah, who had long suspected the possibil¬
ity of 3-D halftone synthesis.

Halftone for art’s sake now the artist can create
worlds and photograph them. (Gordon Romney,
Utah)

Watkins method: A new nearest surface is
instantly sensed through continuous comparison
of the closest two

(Note: more output by
various Utah systems
appear on following pages.)

HOU AVAILABLE! Machine running Watkme
technique, the Watkine Box, alloue
uou to view imaginary objects in
color and manipulate them in real time.

See top of preceding page.

The scene was represented by a collection of edge
boxes, physically jumpered into a collection of facet
boxes. Each edge box and facet box was loaded with
certain numerical and logic values, representing edges
and facets in the scene, which could change between
frames as required by the action.

In the preprocess for each frame the old nasa sys¬
tem used a specially buill digital computer, the "vec¬
tor calculator." This performed at greal speed the
three-part vector calculations necessary lo determine
all scene positions, including the positions and slants
of all edges. Each individual edge generator, loaded
with its own edge position, constantly reported whether
the running scan of the picture was to the left or right
of its own edge. It dutifully guarded this edge from
border lo border of the picture.

"Ola NASA" method: tach edge t»« constantly
reports which side of its edge the scan is on.
each facet bo> sums the edge reports to sense
when the scan is crossing it

The Wylie-Romney method is this: for each picture-
point desired in the final picture, shoot a searching
ray through the scene at a corresponding angle. Find
where this searching ray hits eveiy surface in its way

Since the locations in space of these hit-points are
easily calculated, figure their distances from the vanlage
point. The nearest of the intersections is the visible
one. Look up the color of that surface and shade the
output point accordingly.

This may sound inefficient, but it is comparatively
easy lo ascertain all the piercing-points, since the sur¬
faces to be hit in a given scanning row can be largely
predicted from the previous row.

John Wurnock's method, also from Utah, is unre¬
lated lo the other methods, but has qualities mathe¬
maticians like, as well as a certain whimsy.

Consider a square in the picture area. (At the start
consider the whole picture area I Now then Test
whether the present square is entirely filled with one
color. If so, output a corresponding square all of lhat
color. If the present square is not all one color, divide
it into four smaller squares. Take another square and
go back to Now then. End the process when each of
the squares in the broken-down picture ho* been
completely filled with one color—or the unsatisfied

Shading: Last of the great fodge-functions

Suppose that we have some data structure represent¬
ing a three-dimensional object, and a halftone method
to search out it* visible surfaces. How do wc shade the
output pouits? What do wc take into account: how
combine the basic greys or colors, how blend them
with computations of surface angle, distances from the
vantage point, or anything else we can think of?

The answer: any way at all. The combining function
is an aesthetic choice. There are not many areas left
where you can make up a mathematical hodge-podge
and get pleasing or interesting results. Computer half¬
tone is a felicitous exception: you can augment by
adding or multiplying, diminish by subtracting or divid¬
ing, and yet always come up with an image resembling
something. Anyone who has worked in a darkroom
will recognize lhat this is like enlarging; playing with
parameter* won't obliterate the picture.

There are purists who insist that halftone coloration
should exactly follow the formula* lhat simulate the
behavior of real light. For some purposes, like pilot
training, this may often bc/truc. But insisting on mathe¬
matical accuracy a* a general principle is like insisting
on ultra-high fidelity—an aesthetic judgment couched
as a mechanical imperative.

Until now the output hardware was not really ready
for halftone Five years ago a computer could usually
create halftone pictures only on a line printer or a
4020 microfilm plotter. Today there are many different
photographic primers, going to all sizes of film and
paper; one even uses a laser. There arc various display
terminals permitting grey-scalc and color halftone on
TV screens.

The age of computer image synthesis has begun.
Polygon systems are fast and simple, and will come
to be used in our daily lives for such diverse purposes
as molecule study, the memorization of delivery routes,
and visualization of every kind of layout and design.
They will be fundamental to our new world of
com outer display. □

COMPUTER DECISIONS

JM37

SECOND ARTICLE.

Surface patterns.
Curvature.
Shadow.

THE PLOT SO FAR.

Various computer methods now make it
possible to create artificial photographs of
three-dimensional objects or scenes represented
in the computer's storage. This is done by
coloring or shading points in an output picture
like the points in the scene that can be sighted
through them from the vantage point. What
the methods really boil down to, though, are
searching processes in the data representation
of the three-dimensional scene.

In an earlier article we have considered
some of the techniques being used to depict
simple scenes-- those made up of polygons.

Now we turn to more elaborate scenes which add
shadows, surface patterns and curvature.

One of the most interesting things about
this branch of computer graphics-- already seen
in the polygon methods discussed earlier-- is
the variety of techniques that can be employed.
Moreover, these methods, for all their sophisti¬
cation, can usually be intuitively understood
as thought they were operations performed on
objects in space. The same continues to be true
for the more complex systems.

Of m L \Tf

VARIOUS NEW TECHNIQUES PERMIT US TO ADD CURVES,
SHADOWS AND SURFACE PATTERNS
TO COMPUTER-GENERATED HALFTONE PICTURES

ENHANCED POLYGON SYSTEMS

MAGNUSKI'S PATTERNED CONSTRUCTIONS

In the methods discussed so far, we looked
at several computer techniques for photograph¬
ically depicting scenes and objects made up of
polygons— planar facets— in a represented
three-dimensional scene. Imaginary houses of
cards, cardboard airplanes and triangular scen¬
ery take on a compelling vividness when depicted
by the computer. And for visualizing such
things as architectural arrangements, such
systems promise to be of increasing practical
value.

Those of us interested in the artistic
aspects of computer halftone images want more.
This article looks at some ways to add the
appearance of curvature and surface pattern
to computer-synthesized images.

MAGHUSKI'S CONSTRUCTIONS OF REPEATED PATTERNS

(different perspective calculations)

is stitched together
in adjacent positions
at appropriate angles.

A number of contributions have been made
by individuals working alone. For instance,
Henry Magnuski, at M.I.T., created a program
that repeatedly positions patterned facets in
space to make large constructions.

This program did not calculate "true"
shadow, basing its shading partly on angle of
surfaces. Neither does it show true curves.

Yet it shows the impressive degree to which
such effects may be approximated. The result¬
ing beach ball picture is reminiscent of Moorish
architecture.

BOUKNIGHT AND KELLEY:

PICKING THROUGH A CAT'S CRADLE

The method of Bouknight and Kelley, at
the University of Illinois, permits the addition
of shadow to polygon pictures. Their method
uses an intricate system of scanning sweeps
across the scene, analyzing the successive edge-
crossings. For each output line, a list of the
edges in the scene is ordered according to which
will be next encountered. To make a specific
output line of shaded points, we step through
successive positions of the scan-line, until an
an edge is crossed. With each edge we cross,
we enter or leave at least one facet. Of all
the current facets we are in after a given edge¬
crossing, the system finds out the nearest one,
the visible one, by comparing distances. The
coloration of this facet is then fed out to the
picture, until the next edge-crossing.

Bouknight and Kelley expand their method
to show shadows by an additional step. They
create a new list of edges to be encountered,
this one relative to scans from the light source.
Then, during the regular output picture scan,
they look to this latter data to see about shadow.
As soon as they know two consecutive edges
of a visible object in the picture, they are able
to search the shadow-edge list to see if any
shadow-edges impinge between them. The final
list of edges-- visible facet edges and shadow
edges-- goes to the picture output device.

BOUKNIGHT-KELLEY METHOD

Consider the series of edges whose
projections cross the current scan-line.
Each time the scan-line crosses an edge,
find out what facets are currently pierced
by a sight-line from the viewpoint. The
nearest of these facets is the visible one.

To add shadow, use an extra list of
the scene’s edges relative to the light
rather than the camera. Between viewed
edges, check for shadow-edges as well.

DON LEE FILLS IN THE GAPS

Don Lee, at the University of Illinois,
produced his fine-toned pictures of spheres in
1966 simply because someone bet him a quarter
he couldn't program the method he'd suggested
in twenty-four hours. He almost made it. He
made his pictures of spheres and polygons by
calculating the boundaries, then checking for
overlap and filling in with greys according to
viewing angle. His program works only in
special cases, but is interesting for its historical
position; it was one of the earliest half-tone
curvature systems.

HAVE A BALL WITH DON LEE.

His program first works out
the general outlines.

SIMPLEX CURVATURE SYSTEMS: MAHL & MAGI

A fundamental type of system we may call
the "simplex" system was exemplified in the
previous article by the Wylie-Romney program.

A simplex technique simply projects simulated
rays toward the scene from the vantage point
till they hit the represented objects, and fills
corresponding positions on the output picture
with the colors encountered on the front surfaces
of objects in the scene.

The same principle extends naturally to
scenes with curved and otherwise embellished
objects.

Robert Mahl, at the University of Utah,
has recently reported his results with simplex
methods using quadric surfaces— those curved
surfaces generated by mathematical powers of
two. His pictures— like the cup and saucer
shown here— have a pleasing 1920s Bauhaus-
like quality.

One problem with this method is that
computational complexity increases rapidly as
the scenes grow more complex; the more surfaces
and piercing-points, the more time-consuming
(and expensive) it becomes to make the picture.

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It seems, however, that Mahl's work may
only be a rediscovery of what one organization
worked out earlier and is being secretive about.

A firm delightfully called MAGI (Mathematical
Applications Group, Inc.) of Elmsford, N.Y.,
has extended the same idea more elaborately.

They happened into the halftone game through
a military contract.

MAGI’s system, now thoroughly developed
under Robert Goldstein, began in 1965 in a study
of radiation hazards in battlefield equipment.

They wrote a program to simulate paths of radia¬
tion, say, that might reach a tank driver under
varous disagreeable circumstances. Having
written a program that would ascertain the sus¬
ceptibility to radiation of battlefield machinery, .
they noted that the same program could be
adapted to making photographs. The progam
simulated radiation; light is radiation; ipso
facto, pictures. Substantially the same program
would make photograph-like images, by treating
the objects as opaque, and reflecting different
shades according to color and angle of view.

The resulting system makes nice pictures
of objects composed of planes and quadric sur¬
faces: and includes, as will be seen from the
racing car and chair, colored surface designs,
shadows and spectral reflections. Not only does
MAGl’s software for this process produce deli¬
cately shaded pictures; if the virtual picture-
plane is moved until it intersects the subject,
it produces a cross-section.

MAGI runs this program remotely in
Fortran on a big computer— but they have their
own minicomputer setup for photographing the
results as color movies. They now offer use of
this system commercially for making movies or
stills.

1 Color

N CHre^o^.-.

tv ^

cole,

>«“l*r

e f I

you

MAGI program was originally developed
for study of radiation hazards inside
military armor; the pseudo-photographic
techniques were a side effe ct of the
approach chosen. Who know; , these
tanfcs may be the ones studied.

MAGI techniques were used to study
alternative ways of lighting nines.

SYNTHEVISION SETUP uses remote time-sharing computer,
running big secret Fortran program and containing
entire data structure of three-dimensional scenes.
Minicomputer photographic setup is on premises at
Computer Visuals, Inc., MAC1 subsidiary marketing
the Synthevlsion service.

Local setup uses Nova minicomputer controlling both
CRT display and camera. Informed guess would sug¬
gest that time-sharing system does not send all
successive points of output line, but difference
and transition values; Nova program would then in¬
terpolate gradations in relatively quiet sections
of the scan-line.

MAGI's precise system is secret. However, the only
real questions boll down to: forms of surface rep¬
resentation; systems of scene sorting; and method
of scene scanning to produce output scan.

Note that one of the most impressive things about
MAGI work, at least for sophisticates, is the de¬
gree of artistic control that seems to have been
realized in their input and revision systems. It
seems they offer excellent control over motion and
color, and, of course, revision of the action in
a scene till the maker is satisfied.

Popular 5c ience . I think it was
Synthevision in fall of 73.

Enlargement from MAGI film. I hope
the reproduction shows the concentric
rings, called Mach bands, that divide
areas of shading; Knowlton and Harmon
(citation p. DM 10) advise on pseudo¬
random techniques for correcting this.

These have been some of the highlights
of the halftone game to date. The methods des¬
cribed so far are mainly software-oriented, and
for the most part work most efficiently as pro¬
grams. In the next article we will look at some
outlandish new forms of equipment, under con¬
struction or proposed, for dedicated production
of 3-D halftone pictures.

, had

third article.

Specialized hardware systems.

SPECIAL EQUIPMENT IS NOW BEING BUILT
FOR MAKING "REALISTIC" HALFTONE
PICTURES BY COMPUTER. THIS ARTICLE
COVERS SOME OF THE MORE UNUSUAL
HALFTONE HARDWARE SYSTEMS NOW IN
EXISTENCE OR BEING PLANNED.

HAfoWHfG-

Of THt AcncTRies

Results of Gouraud's swell smoothing technique. Mme. Gouraud posed
for the dafa structure on the left, a system of interconnected .flat polygons.
The Gouraud process (see box below) created the smooth-looking face
from it by an extremely simple process. (Note that the power of the
technique is in the use of a simple polygon data structure, rather than
the more difficult truly-curved surfaces used, e.g., by MAGI.)

(Note also that the edges remain jagged.)

ttARJTmei A'COMifcT.

In two previous articles we have summar¬
ized some of the important basic techniques in
computer halftone-- the artificial construction by
computer of photographic pictures of 3-D scenes,
scenes which are represented within the computer
as colored or shaded surfaces placed in a coor¬
dinate system of three dimensions.

The techniques we have looked at were
all intuitively "spatial" in character, having to
do with the analysis of sight-lines and relative
edge positions, and suited to implementation in
computer software. Now we turn to some more
advanced and peculiar techniques and equipment
intended to make 3-D computer halftone faster
to use, or more realistic, or easier to work with
or cheaper. These systems represent a coming
generation df‘halftone hardware.

1 suggested this cover
for this article. The
folks at Computer Decisions
reacted with puzzlement
if not dismay. "This cover
doesn't have practical
applications for the
average user ." I think
someone said.

THE WATKINS BOX

The University of Utah is now building
what wil be for some time the world's most
spectacular interactive computer display, the
Watkins Box. This device, interfacing between
a computer and a television screen, will carry
out the Watkins algorithm (described in the
first article of this series) in real time : ripping
through a predigested list of facet information,
the Watkins Box will create on the screen an
image of an opaque object which the user can
rotate or see manipulated by program.

The Watkins Box can operate in two modes:
normal mode, in which the object appears faceted,
and Gouraud mode, in which it appears to be
curved over (see masks, nearby).

The Gouraud algorithm, developed by a
graduate student of that name, is a ridiculously
simple technique which marries perfectly to the
Watkins method. Instead of shading the facets
uniformly, this technique calculates a shade of
gray for each point. In effect the method inter¬
polates the shade of the point from those around
it, across facet boundaries. In actual proced¬
ure, the Gouraud method shades a point by
linear interpolation between two edge-colors:
the color of the last edge and the next edge to
be encountered on the present scan-line.

(These shades are in turn found by linear inter¬
polation between their endpoints.)

It will be noted that Gouraud's method
does not curve the edges. But considering its
simplicity as a small addition to the Watkins box,
that's no great sacrifice.

Naturally, the Watkins Box will not reach
the private home for several years: current
likely price is in six figures. But that's now.

GOURAUD'S TWIST adds the appearance of
curvature to a faceted object shown opaquely
by the Watkins method (described in first
article).

Instead of shading each point within a facet
with the same color, interpolate between the
vertex-colors according to how far down the
edges you've gotten. Note that the jagged
edges are retained.

GtwWrt SPECIAL wr

M 3§

PRA’S WORLD'VIEW

Roger Boyell, of Pennsylvania Research
Associates. Philadelphia, likes lo refer to the
company's main interest as "modelling the phys¬
ical world." Thus he and his associates have
developed systems for cartography, landscape
modelling, pipe design, and simulation of com¬
plex radar systems.

A radar simulator they are putting to¬
gether for the Navy will show the results of any
possible radar system moving over any possible
terrain. A pilot or navigator trainee, in a sim-
mulsted cockpit, will see the mission's changing
radar picture as he changes the plane's course
or the radar's tuning. The radar picture, ap¬
pearing on a screen and changing In real lime,
will look just the way Ihe radar would look on
a real mission-- flying In perspective among
mountains or valleys, high or low. at any bear¬
ing and speed, and viewed through any type of
radar.

Boyell's approach is to treat each cotnpo-
nent of the pictorial/radar simulation as a
separate problem, to be handled in different
ways, and blended in a final buffer, a core
memory which is read out to television. Sepa¬
rate mechanisms supply components of shadow,
specular reflection, coloration and randomizing
effects. The core buffer continuously refreshes
the scanned CRT display.

Boyell has pul the same techniques to
work making simulated halftone pictures of the
moon (see cut). Both the radar and moon sys¬
tems use the same type of halftone image synthe¬
sis. even though superficially they seem quite
different. But radar is radiation. Just like light,
and Boyell's techniques of three-dimensional
modelling and search apply equally well to de¬
piction by reflected visible light-- i.e., half¬
tone images.

.... ^81

faui'JWWW ..

core-net- - a TV inage constantly

heir" T'' like the Know 11on-Schwartz

setup: ... , . I DM24, top Schwartz

picture) . 'i ,u. Individual features <>m'-

at-a-clne to natch a changlnr, view.

An outfit called 1IUMRR0, In Vaahlnf t -> n , say
they have a real-tine Interactive
that will knock several people i>'.’
ballpark— especially the CC har
the Evans and Sutherland Watkins i;

Evidently they have In mind the use of
such high-performance scope* for'teach 1ng, al¬
lowing students to explore intricate threo-
dtaenslonal scenes or objects. Terrific.

(Note: compare the claim of 16,000 edges
on a $150,000 system with the 2000 (?) edges
allowed by the old NASA system built by CE,
or the Watkins Box-- I don't know how oany
cdpes-- at S500,000 from Evans and Sutherland.)

THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME

If these systems sound far fetched. or only
for theoreticsl investigation. consider this: the
Air Force is now letting contracts for sn ad
vanced flight training simulator that is s small
boy s dream. To be situated in Dry Lake.
Arizona. Ihe simulator will have the most real¬
istic cockpits ever built: the entire mockup will
turn and tilt In response to the user, and the
ml* will even swell and deflate . to simulate
acceleration and weightlessness. The cockpits
alone, without the visual display screens, will
cost ten million dollars each .

But the visual systems-- ah. The pilot-
user will look out inlo an artificial world, among
whose mountains and meadows and clouds he
will fly In resl time. Six CRTs, arranged as
parts of a dodecahedron In an entire visual
surround, will show him the chsnging ten-sin
and flying environment. Each of these CRTs
will be driven by a real time perspective
halftone simulator, with all displays spliced to¬
gether and driven by a master simulator res¬
ponding lo his actions. Who will build them is
not yet decided; they could be Waroock or GE
boxes.

The sheer joy of such a system will be
hard to beat. But no doubt others will be on
the way-- perhaps at the amusement park level.

at the scans . the pilot will sec a res¬
ponding perspective simulation of the
world he la flying through, planes he la
dog fighting with, and who knows— witches?
Superman?

tor of eif >

I don’t expect you to believe this. because
not even my patent attorney does, but the system
1 call Fantasm is intended to make pictures that
pass the Turing-test: you won't be able to tell
them from real photographs . Fantasm is inten¬
ded to allow the user to make realistic. Hierony
mus Bosch-like photographs and movies, with
real-looking people (and scenery, imaginary
characters, monsters, etc.) in scenes of arbi¬
trary complexity. It is expected that 1975 eco¬
nomics will make its construction feasible.

Fantssm I originally conceived as a method
of making realistic photographs and movies, not
knowing at the time that this was Impossible,
but feeling it could be done somehow if the
problem were broken down sufficiently. At
times it was not clear which of us would be
broken down first. 1 or it.

It occurred to me sometime in 1960-1 that
computer-interpolated, Disney-type cartooning
methods would be feasible. After some thought
1 realized that pseudo-photography would be
possible, and dropped the cartooning idea. The
atrange behavior of people whom I told about
this led me to increasing secrecy.

The general goal was to make a system
that could do realistic movies without scenery
or actors, end make pictures indistinguishable
from real photographs of reai Bccnery and
actors. ("What do you mean , indistinguishable
from photographs?" people keep asking. What
do they mean what do I mean?) The surfaces
are to be put in by "sculptors," animated by
"puppeteers," and photographed by a "director."
The objective is for moviemaking lo be under
ihe utter imaginative control of the creative user.

hT 0$r REV fA

at least to certain readers.

A scene of arbitrary curvature and topology Is represented
In S Syates of holding registers; the surface Is presented
(through D-to-A converters and an array parallel function gener¬
ator) to Interrogating circuitry which steers an Inquiring signal
around the represented aurfacea. Operation la empirical. Array
has partition Ingle allowing simultaneous queries of various sub¬
surfaces. Feedback steering circuitry allows multiple loops
through array. Steering signal and returned surface parameter
ere analog and continuous. Llat techniques manage shadow and
visibility 'umbrellas' (surfaces of occulted volumes or umbras).

The Fantasm Scene HachlnrfB*, the representation and search
array, Is one chip repeated in a carpet. Large-scale Integration
permits the required digital atorage of about 500 bits per sur¬
face section plus analog .circuitry and switching logic. Patent

The system could come In a number of dif¬
ferent versions. One of these involves a large
array of LSI computing modules (the checkerboard
Scene Machine) to be guided by special hardware
under on unusual monitor running on a general-
purpose computer. The checkerboard Scene
Machine holds a great spread of surface data.

It is a logical curiosity, an array that replies as
a unit, ignoring cell boundaries, to electrical
explorations of the shapes represented in it.

The resulting trace makes various 3-space ex¬
plorations on the faces, mountains or automobiles
spreadeagled in il. Think of its trace as a
radio-controlled firefly skating over a bumpy
checkerboard. Using this machine, and various
cat's-cradle list structures based on the geom¬
etry of light around odd volumes of occutlation.
the problem of halftone analysis of arbitrary
shapes is solved by brute force rather than
analytically. A variety of other processes have
also been defined in Ihe system for other types
□f graphic application.

As far os 1 have been able to learn, Fan¬
tasm is the moat baroque computer graphic system
anyone has proposed. It la not intended to oper¬
ate in real time, but rather take as long as it
needs, or as long as Ihe user wants to pay for.
to fill in complex visual details, shadow, reflec¬
tions. curlicues, leaves, hair, etc. It is best
suited to the production in Panavision of Busby
Berkeley musicals, or "The Lord of the Rings"
with realistic wraiths and interspecies battles.

Bui it may well cost too much to use for that.
Indeed, its economics seem to improve in low-
budget settings like videotape, although there
its output bandwidth will flower unseen. But
the Scene Machine should also be useful for
more mundane applications, such as contour
mapping, automobile design, advertising photo¬
graphy and medical Illustration.

«*■

W'*-

tkaRyw

SUMMARY: out 11 nee handled by Periaeter Paraaetcr Occul cation
Chasing, fill-in by Bullet Search, aninatlon continuity »»n»gi»ent
by 1 1st-procca a 1ng technlquea.

I an indebted to Frof , Char lee Strauee
for the formalization of my emoothing-
funotion.

fourth article.

Systems of Compuler Image Corporation.

OwrOTC*. W>k)»

80 FAR WE HAVE SUMMARfZED AND DISTINGUISHED AMONG
THE MAJOR TECHNIQUES FOR COMPUTER SYNTHESIS OF IMAGES
FROM DIOITALLY STORED REPRESENTATIONS OF SCENES.

WE NOW TAKE THE WRAPS FROM A DIFFERENT BUT RELATED
SET OF TECHNIQUES - THE SYSTEMS OF
COMPUTER IMAGE CORPORATION.

Lee Harrison III got the ides for Whst is
now Compuler Image Corporation in 1959. Al¬
ready having an art degree, he went on for a
degree In electrical engineering, and through
long lean years put together the technical basics
around which Ct'a ay atoms are now built. Com¬
puter Image Corporation la now a going concern,
and output from their ay sterna, especially Scan-
tmate, ia now widely vialble on television.

Computer Image Corporation seems io be
the first firm to be commercially successful in
the halftone field. Whether they should be
Included with the others ia arguable, however.
Their ayatema are not widely understood, and
the relation of theae systems to the other syalcms
and programs described in these articles is
problematical. Among the few who understand
their techniques. some argue thal they do not
synthesize images si all. but rather twist pre¬
existing pictures with a sort of Moog synthesizer,
and that their analog techniques are really just
compound oscillators rather than true computing.

I think that this view is wrong, at least as
regards their most ambitious system, and that
Cl's techniques deserve review. All the world
is not digital. Cl systems do fill up areas with
grey-scale (and other) pictures, and their sys¬
tems involve three-dimensional coordinates,
occullation and coloration; thus I think it ap¬
propriate to discuss them here.

The following discussion is the first. I
believe, to lift the veil of secrecy that has hith¬
erto confounded observers of this company’s
work. In the light of the extreme sophistication
with which they have pursued extremely strange
techniques, they should benefit from the wider
understanding. (Note that this material, which
has been assembled from various sources and
careful TV watching, la partly conjectural.)

Compuler Image's systems represent an
apparently unpromising approach brilliantly
followed through.

All of Cl’s systems are a strange combin¬
ation of closed-circuit TV and analog components
out of a music synthesizer; oscillators, poten¬
tiometers , interconnection networks. The basi c
mechanisms are the same for all. but they sre
carried to different logical extremes . with dif¬
fering accoutrements, in the four systems.

They all seem to be based on the extraordinary
Animac II. not yet implemented; it would seem
that for business reasons the company decided
to raise money promoting simpler systems, so
its bread and butter now consists of two less
ambitious systems, Scanimate and Animac I;
both of which might be puzzling if not recog¬
nized as parts of a more elegant whole. It
would seem they were designed backwards as
spinoffs from Animac II. as was CAESAR, their
more recent 2-D system.

The extraordinary ramifications and
varieties of this system, with all its electronic
add-on and composite methods, stagger the most
jaded technical imagination.

At the heart of the Cl systems is the prin¬
ciple of filling areas of a CRT screen with an
oscillating trace. This is a principle common
to both Lissajous figures and television; but
Computer Image has elaborated it peculiarly.

By variations they paint twisted television images,
wiggle sections of superimposed drawings, create
moving filigree effects, and hope to animate
whole groupa of opaque electronic puppets in
3-space.

Consider an oscillating trace on an oscillo¬
scope. This is a two-dimensional oscillation,
having two signals, x and y. But s three-dim¬
ensional oscillation is also possible; any third
signal, z, can be interpreted as a third dimen¬
sion. meaning that a "point of light" is whirling
out some pattern in a three-dimensional apace--
an oscillotank. so to speak. Let us call this
point moving in three dimensions a "space trace.”

Now to view this trace we need to cut it
down to two dimensions. By ignoring one of
the traces we can view the oscillotank in certain
fixed ways; but by creating a "view calculator,"
a box performing certain perspective transfor¬
mations on the three signals of the apace trace,
we may obtain a view of the oscillotank from a
movable vantage point. This is an x-y view
which we may put on an ordinary oscilloscope.

Let ua now add one more signal, b (for
brightness). This is the brightness signal fam-

T3r

AE5AR System, Characters are
sde to nova Java and lips by
olntlng technique stellar to
nimac II (below) , but in euch
way as to matte over drawn
rtwork-- meantime wiggling

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gives us a window into o peculiar sort of world:
a world In which luminous shapes can undulate and
spin on invisible spindles (Seaniaate), or wiggle
as separate bones (CAESAR.

Tubelike shapes nay be rotated and shaped in
3D (Aniaac), and puppets nay eventually be rolled
like cigarettes (Aniaac II), which a»y then be
painted from a TV pickup on the side nearest the

By using a storage tube and spinning the traci
close together, like cotton candy, and cutting off
the painting signal while the trace la within the
area already filled, we get electronic masking:
which blends animated drawings in 2D (CAESAR)
and may eventually manage shadows and occultation
masking laong 3D puppets (Aniaac II).

Lis a ajc_ufi and zigzag fig
are rapidly spun In three dimei
-- that is, varying voltages x
and z. The resulting "tubes” ,
"curtains" are then viewed by |
spectlve calculation. The ciri
permits these shapes to flex a
joints, wave, and go through o
changes.

IR SCANIMATE: zigzag and
curling shapes define
moving scroll on whlcl

IN CAESAR: curling 4hape:
treated 2-dimenalona
aa blocking controls

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— AND LATER, IN THE SAME FRAME:

cut off the
brightness of
the output signal,
wherever there la
already an Image

Brightness of the spot is thus independent
of the movement of the space trace. For example,
the apace trace could describe a helical path, a
sort of tornado motion, and we could time its
spinning to phase with a TV signal. If we now
brighten the apace trace only with the bright¬
ness signal of a TV pickup, we now will see
fin our view of the oscillotank) what would look
like a TV picture curled around itself in space.

Output from ell these signals is ordinsrily
picked up by another vtdicon. which stabilizes
it by converting it into conventional television
imagery,

A lest Ct technique, technically minor but
remarkable In effect, permits this blocking and
shadowing among separate objects. This is the
use of a storage CRT tube on which every frame
is painted (from the viewpoint or from the light
source). The picture is painted on the storage
CRT, nearest things first; and the return signal
from the screen tells whether the space trace ia
crossing an srea already painted during the
frame. The tube’s output signs! then effectively
constitutes a silhouette. This clue indicates that
the space trace should not be visible; and hence
is used to cut off brightness while the trace is
within the already-filled arcs. This gates
between two desired objects or pictures, fore¬
ground and background. If operated from the
point of view of the light, it gates shadow: the
signal is used to control the relative brightness
or the shadowed and unshadowed features of a
puppet in 3-space.

A fascinating variety of embellishments
has been put into these systems by Cl’s ingen¬
ious engineers. Coloration o( the final video
signal is added by gating color levels under
control of the brightness signal. permitting pic¬
tures with several grey-Ievela to be transformed
to up to four rainbow hues. Separate shapes
described by the space trace may be indepen¬
dently moved and jointed at the same time:
Harrison pointedly calls such separate shapes
’’bones." Darkening at the backside of s spun
shape, or brightening at edges of s painted por¬
tion. and brightening in proportion to curl, are
all strange capabilities of this machine. Lip-
synchronized mouthlike motion can be imparted
to any part of the shape spun by the space trace
(whether or not a mouth is painted on it), by an
audio detector feeding directly to the circuitry
from a live mike. And the limbs of Cl’s ghostly
figures can be made to swing by connection of
sensors to the animators themselves-- in a living
pantograph.

SCANIMATE is a popular device now widely
used (at Cl’s studios) for the making of TV com¬
mercials and station-break emblems. This ia
their simplest system, used for the conversion
and discombobulation of flat artwork. In Scant-
mate, the space trace is controlled by hand-
operated potentiometers. Two separate oscillator
settings are available, so that the space trace
can have two separate oscillation patterns,
spinning out two entirely different virtual shapes
in 3-spacc. A hand-throttle eases from one
oscillator setting to the other. This permits an
image to be moved, shrunk or enlarged, or
flipped; to go from whirling around to a sort of
hula; and many more effects. The picture
painted on it may be seen to roll on invisible
spindles, bloom into fountains, or undulate os
pennants-- all by modulating the brightness of
the flying spot as it traces its unseen shape.

This shape, in turn, can move between its two
forms under control of the throttle.

I Animac 1 (usually called Animac) provides

greater flexibility in controlling the space trace.
The system’s oscillations are controlled by an
input vidicon, which artists may quickly modify
with pastel check at the pickup. Ghostly tubu¬
lar lettering, swarming pendulum-patterns and
jiggling filigrees arc among the possible doodles.

CAESAR, their newest system, is oriented
toward Yogi Bear-type animation. The artist's
cartoons are automatically superimposed on a
background or each other. They may be moved,
and made to wiggle under real-time control by

But it is to Animac II that these curiosities
lead. What Harrison calls the "Snow White
Capability” of Animac II will permit the sculpture
of full humanoid puppets, with perhaps thirty
articulated "bones.” opaque to one another and
casting shadows, colored, moving and talking.

Two young fellas In a Manhattan loft,
Messrs. Rutt and Etrs, are offering a
machine similar to Scanimate but much

The only picture I've been able to
find that relates to the 3D sculpturing of
Animac II la this frame, blown up from a
short 16am sequence. The figure is sculp¬
tured from oac 1 list ions In three variables,
modulated to represent this figure of thir¬
teen sections or "bones.” Head and torso
are clearly visible in the film; the figure
Is seen to spin ss if in an ejection seat.

It's not aa finely detailed-- the inn'
screen runs at 525 lines rsther thsn
700— but It costs some $15,000 lnat«'
of $150,000.

DM 40

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WHAT ABOUT REAL THREE-DIMENSIONAL
DISPLAY?

In science-fiction stories you hear about
how objects are made to appear as if they’re
standing in the middle of the room. For instance,
I believe that in Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange
Land they watched a "tank" in which things
appeared.

Well, a lot of people have thought about
this, and it's not so easy as you might think.

One interesting scheme used a sort of
translucent propellor, spinning rather fast, on
which computer- generated images were pro¬
jected from below. It was done by the dotting
method, so that a bright dot of light would ap¬
pear high or low in space depending on whe¬
ther it was projected on a relatively high or low
point on the propellor.

JL KH-*)

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This was interesting but had numerous
disadvantages - not the least of which was the
danger of the thing flying apart. (Translucent
materials tend not to be as strong as, say,
metal.) Another basic problem, though, was
the fact that any given point in the space could
only be displayed at a given time , when the
propellor's height in that region was just right,
and that meant that at that given instant you
couldn't display any of the other points that
could only be displayed at that instant. A con¬
siderable disadvantage.

Probably the most astonishing 3D display
is Sutherland's Incredible Helmet. This consists
of a helmet with two dinky CRTs mounted on it,
each being driven in real time by a perspective
system (such as the LDS-1) and set up with
prisms to the wearer's eyes. Through the prisms
the wearer can see the real world in front of him.
Reflected in the prisms, however, and thus mixed
into the view of the real world, is the glowing
wire-frame being presented to him-- in perspec¬
tive, and with its separate views merging into
an apparent object in front of him . But he need
not stand still: as he moves, the helmet's chan¬
ging position is monitored by the program, and
the display system changes the views accordingly
meaning he can walk around and through a dis¬
played object. The illusion, and the possibilities,
are fantastic: imaginary architecture, explanations
and diagrams of things in the room, poetry that
changes as you walk through it, ... well, you
work on it. Not available commercially.

There was a lot to be said for tents. They
could be made by tailors, rather than construc¬
tion gangs; they could be transported and stored
flat. Their surfaee-to-volume ratios couldn't be
beat.

Noting this, an architect named Ron Resch
said to himself: what about making large-scale
foldable structures, likeunto geodesic domes,
that cou Id be simply manufactured in sheet
form and creased at the factory, then bolted and
cabled and strutted in the field?

Resch has now for years been experi¬
menting with complex folded structures.

There's only one trouble. If you've
messed with paper airplanes you know that
folding is an inaccurate process, and so the
prospect of discovering complex geometric struc¬
tures by the hand-folding of paper is rather
slim.

Recognizing this, Resch has contrived to
work at a computer display. His work-- the
search for great folding structures-- is one of
the first practical uses of halftone polygon
computer graphics. He is, naturally, at the
University of Utah.

Lou Katz, of NYU, put old-fashioned stereop-
ticons up to the CRT, and diapLayed two separate
views to the two eyes. Works fine, even with
isometric display.

Bob Spinrad of Xerox Data Systems has a
patent on displaying 3D from a computer through
an ordinary color TV. Assuming you're using
some standard way of refreshing the TV-- des¬
cribed elsewhere-- the image for one eye is dis¬
played in green , the other in red , and you look
through red and green glasses . The wonders of
modern science. Spinrad chuckles over It him¬
self.

Another scheme glued silver Mylar to the
front of a loudspeaker, then played a soft hum
through the loudspeaker to pulse the Mylar back
and forth. Then you used that as a mirror to
look at what was going on the CRT-- which was
showing a lot of points at odd places that would
appear to be in space. Unfortunately this was
hard to coordinate, and, like the propellor,
often required you to put dots in several placeB
at once, which don’t work.

For a while you could get— maybe you
still can-- a three-dimensional computer output
device. Here's what it did: it created objects
showing data structures that had three variables.
(It didn't make wire-frame objects or the like.)
Automatically ejecting wire through a styrofoam
block, and snipping the done ones, it created
little mountains showing three-dimensional data.
Very cute. Since many people have problems
with mountainous computer data, it probably
should have caught on.

Then a lot of people mumble the word
"holography," as if that is going to settle some¬
thing. While holograms are terrific and remark¬
able, and have been produced on computers,
making them is not a process that can be carried
out decently on sequential machines— let alone
making them in real time. So if a solution to
interactive three-dimensional computer display
is going to come through holography, it means
a whole new batch of technology will have to be
invented.

My friend Andrew J. Singer, who comes
and goes in the computer field and is one of
the five or six smartest people I ever met, says
he knows how to build a display tank, and I
believe him. He explained it quickly to me once
and I asked him to tell it again, but he just said
sadly, "What's the use-- there are so many
great things that could be done..."

FOUR DIMENSIONS, EGAD

So much for three dimensions. Now, some
readers are bound to ask, "What about four dim¬
ensions?" because they are science-fiction fans
or troublemakers or mathematicians or something.

Just as we can make a two-dimensional
picture of a three-dimensional object, it is pos¬
sible, dear reader, to make a two-dimensional
picture of a four- dimensional object.

What is a four-dimensional object?

Why, any object that has four dimensions,
(thanks a lot, you say), or even four measurable
qualities , such as height, weight, age and grade
point average. Well, let's not get into that, but
it turns out that views of such multidimensional
structures may be obtained by the same homogen¬
eous matrix technique^ already mentioned for
regular perspective calculations. Rule of thumb:
however many dimensions your data has originally,
you add one more dimension, homogeneous with
the rest, and there exist formulas (sorry, I don't
have them) for view calculation.

(Note, of course, that while a two-dimen¬
sional view is a picture , a three -dimensional
view is a three-dimensional object-- you'll have
to view it on an interactive 3D computer display
of some kind.)

DM 41

From videotape ,

"The Hydrogen Atom
According to
Quantum Mechanics"
by T.J. O'Donnell
& David Parrish.

11 is
especially
Usually it
finagling.

usualiy hard to combine things:
complicated technical things,
takes infinite reconsiderations,
modification, intertwingling.

The Circle Graphics Habitat, however,
is something else again. It results from
two intricate, independent technological
developments, each an intricate system care¬
fully crafted by an exceptionally talented
person, coming together like two hands clap-
ing. hike ham and eggs, like man and woman,
Sandin's Image Processor and DeFanti's GRASS
language conjoin directly and interact per¬
fectly as if they had been made for each
other, which they were not.

Dan Sandin's Image Processor (see p.d>M2)
is a system of circuit boxes that allow '

video images to be dynamically colored, mat¬
ted, dissolved and palpitated; Tom DeFanti's
language (see "Coup de GRASS, p.J)^^!) per¬
mits the rapid creation, viewing and manip¬
ulation of three-dimensional objects on the
screen of a particular computer setup.

To combine them, you just point Dan's
system at Tom's system.

Let's say that on the screen of Tom's
system we are viewing an animated bird,
flapping its wings. Since it's being shown
on a three-dimensional refreshed line display
(see pp-3^ 7 ‘3,b*\5o) , it appears only as white
lines on a dark screen.

Dan merely points a TV camera at Tom's
screen, and runs the TV signal into his Im¬
age Processor. Now, in the Image Processor,
he gives it the magic of color. Different
colors, interplaying with gradations and
subtlety.

From the Image Processor, the finished
signal goes out to videotape recorders.

What then have we overall? One of the
world's most flexible facilities for the
rapid production of educational videotapes.

To explain something, you create a
three-dimensional stick-figure "model" of it,
using DeFanti's GRASS language. Then you
make a videotape of it, showing rotations or
other manipulations, using the Image Proces¬
sor to give it color.

DeFanti and Sandin have spent much of
the academic year '73-4 getting the kinks out
of this procedure. (Many of the difficulties
stem from the unreliability of videotape re¬
corders.) Stills from some of the first work
are shown here.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Thomas A. DeFanti, Daniel J. Sandin and

Theodor H. Nelson, "Computer Graphics as
a Way of Life." To be presented at U.
of Colorado computer graphics conference,

July 1974; to appear in proceedings pur¬
portedly to be called Computers and Graphics .

■fte T'tfUC Of VjOU&Hf

Uneducated people typically think of
education as the learning of a lot of facts
and skills. While facts and skills certainly
have their merits, "higher education" is also
largely concerned with tying ideas together,
and especially alternative structures of such
tying-together: with showing you the vast un¬
certainties of things.

A wonderful Japanese film of the fifties
was called Rasho - Mon . It depicted a specific
event-- a rape-- as told by five different
people. As the audience watches the five se¬
parate stories, they must try to judge what
really happened.

The Rasho-Mon Principle: everything is
like that. The complete truth about something
is never known.

Nobody tells the complete truth, though
some try. Nobody knows the complete truth.
Nowhere may we find printed the complete truth.
There are only different views, assertions,
supposed facts that support one view or another
but are disputed by disbelievers in the particu¬
lar views; and so on. There are "agreed-on
facts," but their meaning is often in doubt.

The great compromise of the western world
is that we go by the rule: assume that we never
know the final truth about anything. There are
continuing Issues, Mysteries, Continuing Dia¬
logues. What about flying saucers, "why Rome
fell," was there a Passover Plot, and Did Roose¬
velt know Pearl Harbor would be attacked?

Outsiders find the intellectual world pom¬
pous, vague in its undecided issues, stuffy in
its quotes and citations. But in a way these
are the sounds of battle. The clash of theories
is what many find exhilarating about the intel¬
lectual world. The Scholarly Arena is simply
a Circus Maximus in which these battles are sche¬
duled.

Many people think "science" is free from
all this. These are people who do not know much
about science. More and more is scientifically
known, true; but it is repeatedly discovered that
some scientific "knowledge" is untrue, and this
problem is built into the system. The important
thing about science is not that everything will
be known, or that everything unanimously believ¬
ed by scientists is necessarily true, but that
science contains a system for seeking untruth
and purging it.

This is the great tradition of western
civilization. The Western World is, in an
important sense, a continuing dialogue among
people who have thought different things.
"Scholarship" is the tradition of trying to
improve, collate and resolve uncertainties.

The fundamental ground rules are that no issue
is ever closed, no interconnection is impossible.
It all comes down to what is written , because
the thoughts and minds themselves, of course, do
not last. (The apparatus of citation and foot¬
note are simply a combination of hat-tipping,
go-look-if-you-don't-believe-me, and you-might-
want-to-read-this-yourself.)

"Knowledge," then-- and indeed most of our
civilization and what remains of those previous--
is a vasty cross-tangle of ideas and evidential
materials, not a pyramid of truth. So that pre¬
serving its structure, and improving its accessi¬
bility, is important to us all.

Which is one reason we need hypertexts and
♦hinkertoys.

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As far as I can tell, these are the techniques used
by bright people who want to learn something other than
by taking courses in it. It's the way Ph.D.'s pick up
a second field; it's the way journalists and "geniuses”
operate; it brings the general understandings of a field
that children of eminent people in that field get as a
birthright; it's the way anybody can learn anything, if
he has the nerve.

1. DECIDE WHAT YOU WANT TO LEARN. But you can't
know exactly , because of course you don't know exactly
how any field is structured until you know all about it.

(M iT.

2. READ EVERYTHING YOU CAN* especially what you
enjoy, since that way you can read more of it and faster.

3. GRAB FOR INSIGHTS- Regardless of points others
are trying to make, when you recognize an insight that has
meaning for you, make it your own. It may have to do with
the shape of molecules, or the personality of a specific
emperor, or the quirks of a Great Man in the Field. Its
importance is not how central it is, but how clear and in¬
teresting and memorable to you. REMEMBER IT. Then go for
another.

4. TIE INSIGHTS TOGETHER. Soon you will have your
own string of insights in a field, like the string of light*
around a Christmas tree.

5. CONCENTRATE ON MAGAZINES, NOT BOOKS. Magazines
have far more insights per inch of text, and can be read
nuch faster. But when a book really speaks to you, lavish
attention onjt.

6. FIND YOUR OWN SPECIAL TOPICS, AND PURSUE THEM.

7. GO TO CONVENTIONS - For same reason, conventions are
a splendid concentrated way to learn things; talking to people
helps. Don't think you have to be anybody special to go to a
convention: just plunk down your money. But you have to have
a handle. Calling yourself a Consultant is good; "Student" is
perfectly honorable.

8. "FIND YOUR MAN.” Somewhere in the world is someone
who will answer your questions extraordinarily well. If you
find him, dog him. He may be a janitor or a teenage kid; no
matter. Follow him with your begging-bowl, if that’s what he
wants, or take him to expensive restaurants, or whatever.

9. KEEP IMPROVING YOUR QUESTIONS. Probably in your
head there are questions that don't seem to line up with
what you're hearing. Don't assume that-you don’t understand;
keep adjusting the questions till you can get an answer that
relates to what you wanted.

10. YOUR FIELD IS BOUNDED WHERE YOU WANT IT TO BE.

Just because others group and stereotype things in convention¬
al ways does not mean they are necessarily right. Intellectual
subjects are connected every whichway; your field is what you
think it is. (Again, this is one of the.things that will give
you insights and keep you motivated; but it will get you into
trouble if you try to go for degrees.)

There are limitations. This doesn't give you lab ex¬
perience, and you will continually have to be making up for
gaps. But for alertness and the ability to use his mind,
give me the man who's learned this way, rather than been
blinkered and cliched to death within the educational system.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Wilmar Shiras, Children of the Atom .

Science-Fiction about what a school could be like where
kids really used their minds. I've always been sure it
was possible; the R.E.S.I.S.T.O.R.S. (see p. 47* made
me surer.

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being an examination of some very Complex Matters
which Nobody Seems to Understand; and whose
Generality of Relevance may be Gradually Apprehended.
[Eventually I hope to develop a somewhat more formal
treatment of "ideas," as distinct from propositions,
sentence kernels, etc. But there is certainly no room
for that here. (Logicians; show me the truth-table of
"BUT.")

Now, it happens that a great deal of writing is concerned with
notes to the reader about accordances in the material. In fact,
quite a few words are exclusively concerned with subtly pointing out
to the reader the accords and discords within the expository structure
of what he is reading. We may call these accordance-connectives or
accordance-notes .

Two of the most basic terms are Indeed and but .

The word indeed has an interesting function.

The process of writing is poorly understood in most quarters.
Many working writers despair of being "systematic," getting
things done as best they can. On the other hand, people who think
they might be able to contribute-- particularly the symbolic logi¬
cians and transformational linguists— being imnersed in their own
formalisms, simply don’t see what’s going on— at least, when I’ve
tried to talk to them.

Writing is not simple. As with vision or speech or riding a
bicycle, an immensely complex process is being unconsciously pur¬
sued.

Some people think you make an outline and follow it, filling
out the details of the outline until the piece is finished. This
is absurd. (True, some people can do this, but that is simply a
shortcutting of the real process.) Basically writing is 4

THE TRY-AND-TRY-AGAIN INTERPLAY of PARTS AND DETAILS against

OVERALL AND UNIFYING IDEAS WHICH KEEP CHANGING.

In fact a number of things are happening, often simultaneously.

We can separate them into three:

1. Provisional development of ideas and poinU:

A) forming overall organizing ideas, B) selecting ten¬
tative points; C) inductively finding overall organiza¬
tion among them; D) finding relations of interest between
points.

2. Complex sifting and adjustment among collections of points,

overall ideas.

3. Fine splicing within developed sequences.

A) transition and juxtaposition managements, B) cross¬
citations, C) smoothing.

Regrettably, there’s no room or time to pursue this here.

{The article I had intended to write would take a whole spread.)

For people who really care about the matter, I will make some
points in very abbreviated form.

The interesting structures in written material include:

"Points"— pieces, sentences, phrases, examples, plot events,
and expository "points."

Organizing principles and structures (which we will call here
arches )— final ironies, things to be led up to, themes,
plots, concepts, principles, expository structures,-or¬
ganizing titles, overconcepts. These may be either local
or global, over the entire work. (Note: arches may not
be heirarchical relative to one another.)

Now, we may think of points and arches as individual objects
which have individual relations to one another. Between two points
ther^ may be a good transition ; a specific point may link well to a
specific arch.

The problem in writing, then, is that overall structures you
choose {systems of arches) may not link well to the points that
have to be included among them; and that transitions between points
don’t work out the way you want them to. Good transitions can’t be
worked out for the sequence of points you want to make, or, alter¬
natively, there are too many good transitions within a specific
structure of points, and picking among them involves difficult
choices especially when you have to devise appropriate arches on
the basis of the final sequence of points.

There are a number of other important structures in written
material. They include accordances, juxtapositions, cross-citations,
connotations, nuances and rhythms.

The only ones we will discuss here are accordances .

The term "accordance," as I shall use it here, is simply a
vaguely formal way of talking about whether things match or fit
together . Two items are in accord if they match or fit well, or in
discord if they match or fit badly. Thus a good transition between
points (as mentioned early) represents an accord, and a good link
between a point and an arch is also an accord.

The word Indeed (in its main use, at the beginning of a sentence)
indicates an accord between what has just been said and what is to
follow. In other words, it functions as a positive transition, impe¬
tus or gas pedal, indicating a continuation of the flow in the direction
already indicated. So do the words thus , then , therefore , moreover , so
and furthermore . These are infix accords , that is, notes of accord
that go between two items. We also see prefix accords , such as

since , inasmuch as , insofar as ; these have to be followed by
two clauses, the second of which is in accord with the first.

The word but is exactly the opposite. It indicates a discord or
contradistinction, a negative transition, "brakes" in the flow. Other
such infix discords include nevertheless , despite this , on the other
hand , even so , and "Actually ,..." Similarly, there are prefix dis¬
cords : while , despite , though ..., notvithstandinq .

I find this topic of inquiry very interesting. These sorts of
terms have been used since time immemorial by writers adjusting their
transitions for smooth flow (note such antiquey variants as haply ,
howbeit , withal , forasmuch and howsomever) , but the importance and
structure of this service has not, I think, been generally understood.

(Note also that there are more intricate accordance-connectives;

I wish we could go here into the structure of In at least ,

..,i£ not ... , _ otherwise — , Anyway ... , and Now ....)

(Note: the try-and-try-again revision and reconsideration process,
tinkering with structural interconnections, is a universal component
of the creative process in everything from movie editing to machine
design. There ought to be a name for it. I can’t think of a satisfac¬
tory one, although I would commend to your attention qrandesigning ,
piece-whole diddlework , grand fuddling , meta-mogrification , and
that most exalted possibility, tagnebulopsis (the visualization of
structure in clouds).)

THE H«'T*6E

The past is like the receding view out the back
of an automobile: the most recent is more conspicuous,
and everything seems eventually to be lost.

We know we chould save things, but what? Those
with the job of saving things— the libraries and mu¬
seums— save so many of the wrong things, the fashionable
and expensive and high-toned things esteemed by a given
time, and most of the rest slips past. Each generation
seems to ridicule the things held in esteem by times be¬
fore, but of course this can never be a guide to what
Bhould be saved. And there is so much to save: music,
writing, sinking Venice, vanishing species.

But why should things be saved? Everything is
deeply intertwingled. We save for knowledge and nos¬
talgia, but what we thought was knowledge often turns
to nostalgia, and nostalgia often brings us deeper in¬
sights that cut across our lives and very selves.*

Computers offer an interesting daydream: that we
may be able to store things digitally Instead of
physically . In other words, turn the libraries to digi¬
tal storage (see Hypertexts, ^.*911 + ); digitize paintings
and photographs (see "Picture Processing* p.!*j0);even
digitize the genetic codes of animals, so that species
can be restored at future dates (see "The Mlciesc Com¬
puter," p. &o).

Digital storage possesses several special advantages.
Digitally stored materials may be copied by automatic
means; corrective measures are possible, to prevent errors
from creeping in— i.e., "no deterioration" In principle;
and they could be kept in various places, lessening man¬
kind’s dependence on its eggs being all in one basket (like
the Library at Alexandria, whose burning during the occupa¬
tion of Julius Caesar was one of the greatest losses in
human history).

But this would of course require far more compact
and reliable forms of digital storage than exist right now.

Nevertheless, we better start thinking about it.

Those who fear a coming holocaust (see p. f'l ) had best think
about pulling some part of mankind through, with some part of
what he used to have.

* See T.H. Nelson, The Snunklng of the Heart : On the

Psychology of Puns and Preterism in CarroH and Others.
1980, unless a decent writing system comes along.

DM 44

HreJC»jTM10*/*L i9fTC*\f-

fwra^fc

In recent years a very basic change has occurred in
nro.JtaUonal systems of all kinJs. We may summarize it

sj^f;rL c .“. b t r Js £“

(and other) multidimensional ways.J

A number of branching media exist or are possible.

Branching movies or hyperfilms (see nearby).
Branching texts or hypertexts (see nearby).

Branching audio, music, etc.

Branching slide-shows.

Wish we could get into some of that stuff here.

^ov/ies

The idea of branching movies is quite exciting.

The possibility of it is another thing entirely.

The only system I know of that worked was at the
1967 Montreal World’s Fair (Expo 67). At the Czech
Pavilion— you will recall that before the crackdown
they had quite a yeasty culture going in Czechoslovakia—
there were some terrific fantic systems going. One was
a wall of cubes with slide projectors inside (that roll¬
ed toward you and back as they changed their pictures).

And then the Movie.

The Czechoslovakian Branching Movie— I forget its
real name— had the audience vote on what was to happen
next at a number of different junctures. What should
she do now, what will he do next, etc. And lo and behold!
after they had voted, the lights went down, and that's
what would happen next. People agreed that this gave
the movie a special immediacy.

REALITY IS OBSOLETE

The Idea that objective reality Is perceived by our senses.

Is an obsolete concept. Old truisms like "seeing is believing",
become much less believable as we become more aware that, the
biological machinery of life Itself, transforms images of the
physical world before we are made conscious of them. These
biological mechanisms share many similarities in principle and
in application, to other mechanisms observed in the natural
environment and those invented for our own use. Since we are
becoming more aware of the nature of perception and those
mechanisms involved, now is the time to gain control of our¬
selves and share more discretion in the operation-of our own
biological machinery. We have entered the age of hyper-reality.

Day-to-day living provides only a limited variety of
physical stimulus, and little incentive to manipulate the
physiological and psychological processing involved. Man's
historical preoccupation with the need to maintain constant
images of the physical world, is a product of his extreme
orientation toward physical survival in a hostile environment.

The current evolving society of leisure orientations removes
this need for constant images and thereby enhances the opportunities
for a more complete use of the sensory apparatus and those re¬
lated brain functions. Many have turned to drugs or meditation.

More specifically it is proposed here, that modern communications
technology be employed as a "vehicle of departure" from this need
for constant images, to bring about a more complete use of the
human technology itself. Hyper-reality is the employment of
technology other than the biological machinery, when used to
affect the performance of the biological machinery beyond its
own limitations. This is almost like making adjustments on a
television set, except you are what's plugged in, and the con¬
trols are outside your body, being part of whatever technology
is interfaced to the body itself. As part of such a man-
machine interface you could extend your own mental processes,
or if you should choose, you could just diddle with the dials.
Hyper-reality is an opportunity to enhance the various qualities
of the human experience. Reality is obsolete.

A — How Waoh8preeB (see p. DM 6)
COPYRIGHT 1973 AUDITAC, LTD.

! 6RE5HETUS-

I never saw the movie— I waited in line several
hours but the line was too long to get into the last show¬
ing. So instead I went backstage and talked to Radusz Cin-
cera, who worked out the system. It turns out that it
didn't work quite the way people supposed. A lot of people
thought that "all the possibilities" had been filmed in ad¬
vance. Actually, there were always only two possibilities,
and no matter what the audience had chosen, somehow the film
was plotted to come down to the same next choice anyway:

Now, in our time, we are turning Gutenberg
around. The technology of movable type created
certain structures and practices around the writ¬
ten word. Now the technology of computer screen
displays make possible almost any structures and
practices you can imagine for the written word.

So now what?

For new forms of written communication am¬
ong people who know each other, jump to "Engel-
bart" piece, nearby.

To learn about new forms of multidimensional
documents for computer screens, jump to "Hyper¬
texts.”

In the actual setup, they simply had two projectors
running side by side, with Film A and Film B, and the
projectionist would drop an opaque slide in front of
whichever wasn't chosen. But Cincera said that aud¬
iences almost always chose the same alternatives anyway,
so half the movie was hardly ever used...

In the early sixties a movie was making the rounds
in which audiences were supposedly allowed to vote on the
ending— "Mr. Sardonicus," I believe it was called. From
the ads it seemed that audiences would be polled as to
which last reel to show. Whether the villain was to get
his comeuppance, or whatever.

Then there was that Panacolor cartridge projector,
mentioned elsewhere, which would have allowed choices by
the user

More recently there's the CMX system, also mentioned
elsewhere. This is a setup, being jointly marketed by
CBS and Memorex, for computer-controlled movie editing.

But actually it could also be used as a branching movie sy¬
stem. Essentially the movie itself is stored frame-by-
frame (as video) on big disks, made by Memorex; and, under
computer control, the output can be switched rapidly among
the frames, effectively showing the stored movies. (To my
knowledge, the video networks haven't yet recognized the
possibilities of this.)

The only trouble is, it's extremely expensive (half a
million?), it has an exact storage capacity limited by the
number of disk tracks (presumably one track per frame) —
perhaps five minutes total one one big unit, but you can
buy more— and it can only give its full performance to
one viewer at a time.) (Or T» fe. mIum* f.*.)

It may be that the most practical branching movie
system would be a cartridge movie viewer and a big stack of
cartridges. When you make your choice, change the cart¬
ridge. But of course that's not i
happen automatically.

i much fun as having it

Or just feel free to browse.

HWTOT

By "hypertext" I mean non-sequential
writing.

Ordinary writing is sequential for two
reasons. First, it grew out of speech and
speech-making, which have to be sequential;
and second, because books are not convenient
to read except in a sequence.

But the structures of ideas are not se¬
quential. They tie together every whichway.
And when we write, we are always trying to
tie things together in non-sequential ways
(see The footnote is a break from

sequence; but it cannot really be extended
(though some, like Will Cuppy, have toyed
with the technique).

I have run into perhaps a dozen people
who understood this instantly when I talked
to them about it. Most people, however, act
more bemused, thinking I*m trying to tell them
something technical or pointlessly philosoph¬
ical. It's not pointless at all: the point is,
writers do better if they don't have to write
in sequence (but may create multiple struc¬
tures, branches and alternatives), and readers
do better if they don't have to read in seq¬
uence, but may establish impressions, jump
around, and try different pathways until they
find the ones they want to study most closely.

(The astute reader, and anybody who's gotten
to this point must be, will have noticed that
this book is in ’'magazine" layout, organized
visually by ideas and meanings, for that pre¬
cise reason. I will be interested to hear
whether that has worked.)

And the pity of it is that (like the man
in the French play who was surprised to learn
that he had been "speaking prose all his life
and never known it"), we've been speaking
hypertext all our lives and never known it.

Now, many writers have tried to break
away from sequence. I think" o£~Nabokov's
Pale Fire , of Tristram Shandy and an odd novel
of Lazaro Cortazar called Hopscotch , made up
of sections ending with numbers telling you
where you can branch to. There are many more;
and large books generally use many tricks to
get around the problem of indexing and review¬
ing what has and hasn’t been said or done al¬
ready.

However, in my view, a new day is dawning.
Computer storage and screen display mean that
we no longer have to have things in sequence;
totally arbitrary structures are possible, anti
1 think that after we've tried them enough
people will see how desirable they are.

DM 45

TYPES OF HYPERTEXT

Let's assume that you have a high-power
display- and storage displays won^t ^ be¬
cause you have to see things move in order
to understand where they come from and what
Jhey ">«»"• (Especially text.) So it has to
be a refreshed CRT.

Basic or chunk style hypertext offers
choices^ eTther as Toot™te-markers (like
isterisksl or labels at the end of a chunk.
Whatever you point at then comes to the screen.

Collateral

hypertext means compound an-
iral lei text (see p.

notations or para

Stretchtext changes continuously . This^ ^
requires very unusual techniques isee
but exemplifies how "continuous” hypertext might
work.

Ideally, chunk and continuous and collateral
hypertext could all Be combined (and in turn col¬
laterally linked; see "Thinkertoys," p.J^Z-).

A "fresh" °r "specific" hypertext-- I don't
have a better term at the moment-- would consist
of material especially written for some purpose.
An an thological hypertext, however, would consist
of materials brought together from all over, like
an anthological book.

A grand hypertext , then, folks, would be
a hypertext consisting of "everything" written
about a subject, or vaguely relevant to it,
tied together by editors (and NOT by "prog¬
rammers," dammit), in which you may read in
all the directions you wish to pursue . There
can be alternative pathways Tor people who
think different ways. People who have to
have one thing explained to them at a time--
many have insisted to me that this is normal,
although I contend that it is a pathological
condition-- may have that; others, learning
like true human beings, may gather and sift im¬
pressions until the ideas become clear.

And then, of course, you see the real
dream.

CAN IT BE DONE?

I dunno.

Licklider, one of computerdom's Great Men,
estimated in 1965 that to handle all text by
computer, and bring it out to screens, would
cost no more than what we pay for all text
handling now . (But of course there is the
problem of what to do with the people whose
lives are built around paper; that can't be
taken up here.)

The people who make big computers say
that to get the big disk storage to hold great
amounts of text, you have to get their biggest
computers. Which is a laugh and a half. One
IBM-style computer person pompously told me
that for large-scale text handling the only
appropriate machine was an IBM 360/67 (a shame
fully large computer). Such people seem not
to understand about minicomputers or the po¬
tential of minicomputer networks-- using, of
course, big disks.

There are of course questions of relia¬
bility, of "big brother" (see Canons, p. )

and so on. But I think these matters can be
handled.

CVWMUlt-
IS It&Li INTOCThJlII&CD.

In an important sense there are
no "subjects" at all ; there is only
all knowledge t since the cross-
connections among the myriad topics
of this world simply cannot be
divided up neatly.

The key is that people will pay for it.

I am sure that if we can bring the cost down
to two dollars an hour-- one for the local
machine (more than a "terminal"), one for the
material (including storage, transmission and
copyrights)-- there's a big, big market. (And
that's what the Xanadu network is about; see
p. f)7.) My assumption is that the way to do
this is not through big business (since all
these corporations can see is other corpora¬
tions); not through government (hypertext is
not committee-oriented, but individualis tic--
and grants can only be gotten through sesqui¬
pedalian and obfuscatory pompizzazz); but
through the byways of the private enterprise
system. I think the same spirit that gave us
McDonald's and kandy kolor hot rod accessories
may pull us through here. (See Xanadu Network,
P-

Hypertext at last offers the possibility
of representing and exploring it all
without carving it up destructively .

Arthur C. Clarke wrote a book entitled
The Lost Worlds of 2001 (Signet, 1972),
about the variants and alternatives of’
that story that did not find their way
to the screen.

In a hypertext version, we could look
at them all in context, in collateral
views, and see the related variants--
with annotations.

The real dream is for "everything" to He
in the hypertext.

Obviously, putting man's entire heritage
into a hypertext is going to take awhile. But
it can and should be done.

.Everything you read, you read from the
screen (and can always get back to right away);
everything you write, you write at the screen
(and can cross-link to whatever you read; see
Canons , p. bh 71 ).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Theodor H. Nelson, "The Hypertext." Proc.
World Documentation Federation, 1965.

Mortimer J. Adler, the ..«n who reduced all of
Western Culture to a few Great Books plus an index
under his own categories, has now Addled the
Encyclopedia Britannica .

Paper moulders. Microfilm is inconvenient.
In the best libraries it takes at least min- '
utes to get a particular thing. But as to
linking them together-- footnoting Aeschylus
with Marcus Aurelius, linking genetic data
to 15th-century accounts of Indian tribes--
well, you can only do it on paper by writing
something new that ties them together. Isn't
that ridiculous? When you could do it all
electronically in seconds?

Now that we have all these wonderful de¬
vices, it should be the goal of society to put
them in the service of truth and learning.

And this is the way I propose. Not through
obscure forms of "information retrieval;" not
through newly oppressive forms of "computer^ -
assisted instruction;" and not through a pur¬
ported science of "artifical intel1igence"
that will create new personalisms to irk us.

All these obstructive oddities, I think, have
developed as separate ideals because of the
grand preposterosity of Professionalism that
has created a world-wide cult of mutual incom¬
prehensibility and disconnected special goals.
Now we need to get everybody together again.

We want to go back to the roots of our civil¬
ization-- the ability, which we once had, for
everybody who could read to be able to read
everything. We must once again become a com¬
munity of common access to a shared heritage.

This was of course what Vannevar Bush
said in 1945 (see ^"Vrjlr) , in an article every¬
body cites but nobody reads.

The hypertext solution in many ways ob¬
viates some of these other approaches, and in
addition retains and puts back together the
great traditions of literature and scholarship,
traditions based on the fact that dividing
things up arbitrarily just generally doesn't
work.

EVERYTHING IS DEEPLY INTERTWINGLED.

(The only way in which my views differ
with those of Engelbart and Pask, I think is
in the matter of structure and hierarchy.

Both men generally assume that whatever
natural hierarchy may exist in particular
subjects needs to be accentuated; I hold that
all structures must be treated as totally ar¬
bitrary, and any hierarchies we find are inter¬
esting accidents.)

- H -

COULDN’T HAVE HYPERTEXT NOVELS, YOU SAY?

Consider the hypertext character of—
Tristram Shandy , by Sterne.

Spoon River Anthology , by Masters.
Hopscotch , by Cortazar.

Pale Fire , by Nabokov.

Remembrance of Things Past , hy Proust.

And, surprisingly, hypertext actually

FIGURES IN Giles Goat-Boy , by Barth.

GLINDA'S MAGIC BOOK

Gllnda the Good, gentle sorceress of the
southern quadrant of the land of Oz— not the
flaphead portrayed by Billie Burke in the
Goldwynized film— has a Magic Book in which
Everything That Happens Is written.

The question, of course, Is how it's
chosen.

You can only watch news tickers for a
short time before getting very bored.

Since 1965 he has been creating Britannica 3,
the venturesome and innovative new version, now on
sale for about half a thou.

Britannica 3 is basically a 3“level hypertext,
made to fit on printed pages by the strictures of
Adler's editing (according to Newsweek . some 200
authors withdrew their work rather than submit to
the kind of restrictions he was imposing).

The idea may be basically good, even though
the sesqutpaedalIan titles may Impaed the raeder.

THE BURNING BUSH

In fact hypertexts were foreseen very
clearly in 1945 by Vannevar Bush, Roosevelt's
science advisor. When the war was in the bag,
he published a little article on various groovy
things that had become possible by that time.

"As We May Think" ( Atlantic Monthly , July,
1945) is most notable for its clear description
of various hypertext techniques-- that is, link¬
ages between documents which may be brought rap¬
idly to the screen according to their linkages.
(So what if he thought they'd be on microfilm.)

How characteristic of Professionalism.
Bush's article has been taken as the starting
point for the field of Information Retrieval
(see p. ), but its actual contents have been
ignored by acclamation. Information Retrieval
folk have mostly done very different things, yet
thought they were in the tradition.

Now people are "rediscovering" the article.
If there's another edition of this book I hope
I can run it in entirety.

DM 46

Mr €H<r€U WT ANj>

Thc Ao&neMwoKi
t>F l^eU-eCT"

Douglas Engelbart Is a saintly man at
Stanford Research Institute whose dream has
been to make people smarter and bring them
together. His system, on which millions of
dollars have been spent, is a wonder and a
glory.

He began as an engineer of CRTs (see
"Lightning in a Bottle," p.ifl6); but his
driving thought was, quite correctly, that
these remarkable objects could be used to
expand man's mind and improve each shining
hour.

Doug Engelbart's vision has never been
restricted to narrow technical issues. From
the beginning his concern was not merely to
plank people down at display consoles, but
in the most profound sense to expand man's
mind. "The Augmentation of Human Intellect,"
he calls it, by which he means making minds
work better by giving them better tools to
work with.

An obvious example is writing: before
people could write things down, men could
only learn what they experienced or were
told by others in person; writing changed
all that. Within the computer-screen fra¬
ternity, the next step is obvious; screens
can double and redouble our intellectual
capacities. But this is not obvious to every¬
body. Engelbart, patiently Instructing those
outside, came up with a beautiful example.

To show what he meant by the Augmentation of
Intellect, Engelbart tied a pencil to a brick .
Then he actually made someone write with it.
The result, which was of course dreadful, En¬
gelbart solemnly put into a published report.
Not yet being able to demonstrate the aug¬
mentation of intellect, since he had as yet
no system to show off, he had masterfully de¬
monstrated the disa ugmentation of intellect:
what happens if you make man's tools for work¬
ing out his thoughts worse instead of better.

As this poor guy was with his brickified pen¬
cil, explained Engelbart, so are we all among
our bothersome, inflexible systems of paper.

Starting small, Engelbart programmed up
a small version of what most fans call "The
Engelbart System" some ten years ago. One
version has it that when it came to looking
for grants, management thought he acted too
kooky, and so assigned a Front Man to make
the presentation. But, as the story goes,
the man from ARPA (see "Military...", p. )
pointed at Engelbart and said, "We want to
back him ."

A small but dedicated group at SRI has
built up a system from scratch. First they
used little CDC 1700 minicomputers; then,
various grants later, they were able to set
up their own PDP-10, in which the system now
resides, and from which it reaches out ac¬
ross the country.

Doug calls his system NLS, or "oN-Line
System." Basically It is a highly responsive,
deeply-structured text system, feeding out to
display terminals. From a terminal you may
read anything you or others have written, and
write with as-yet-unmatched flexibility.

The display terminals are all over. The
project has gone national, though at great ex¬
pense: through the ARPA net of computers, you
can in principle become a user of NLS for
something like $50,000 a year.

THE "KNOWLEDGE WORKSHOP"

For a lucky fifty or so people, Engelbart '9
system is Horae. Wherever they are— at Stan¬
ford Research Institute or far away on the
ARPAnet— a whole world of secretarial and
communication services is at their fingertips.
The user has but to call up through his dis¬
play terminal and log on. At that point all
his written files, and numerous files shared
among the users, are at his fingertips. He
may read, write, annotate the croBs-link.
(Engelbart's system has provision for col¬
lateral structuring: see "Thinkertoys," i^TZ..)
He may send messages to others in the Workshop.
He may open certain of his files to other
people, and read those that have been opened
to him.

This all has a certain vagueness if you
do not understand how bound you are today by
paper— the problems of finding it, sorting
it, looking things up. (If you write , that
is, write a lot , you know all too well how
intractable is paper, what a damned nuisance.)
With a system like Engelbart's, now, whatever
is written is instantly there . Whatever you
want to look up is instantly there , simultan¬
eously Interconnected to everything else it
should be connected to— source materials,
footnotes, comments and so on. A document is
completed the moment It is written: no human
being has to retype it. (It need not be typed
on paper at all, if it's just for the workshop
members: a printout is only needed if it has
to go to someone outside the system.)

In many ways, Engelbart's system is a pro¬
totype for the world of the future, I hope.

ALL HANDLING OF PAPER IS ELIMINATED. Whatever
you write, you write on the screens with key¬
board and pointer. (No more backs of envelopes,
yellow pads, file cards, typewriters.) What¬
ever you transmit to fellow users of the system
you simply 'release'— no physical papet changes
hands.

The group has also worked out some remark¬
able techniques for collaborative endeavor.

Two people— say, one in California and one in
New York— can work together through their
screens, plus a phone link; it's as if they
were side-by-side at a magic table. Each sees
on his screen what the other sees; each controls
a moving dot (or "cursor") that shows where he's
pointing. The effect Is somewhere between a
blackboard and a desk; both may call up docu¬
ments, point things out in them, change them,
and anything else two people might do when work¬
ing on something together.

Engelbart meets with someone
far away , as others watch.

THE SYSTEM ITSELF

Basically the system la a large-scale setup
for the storage, bringing forth, viewing and
revision of documents and connections among them.

The documents are stored (of course) in
alphabetical codes. Connections among them,
or other relations within them, are signalled
by the presence of other codes within them;
these are ordinarily not displayed, however,
except as directed by a particular display
program and display programs can of course
vary.

There are various programs for display,
in large part depending on what sort of
screen system the individual user has.

(NLS is used with everything from high-reso¬
lution line-drawing screens converted to 1000-
line television, down to inexpensive Delta
Data terminals— a brand, incidentally, that
allows text motion, which most don't} Engel¬
bart’ 8 system is extremely general , allowing
the creation of files having all kinds of
structures, and display programs in all kinds
of styles. (I hope that this side of the pre¬
sent book conveys a sense of how many styles
that can be.) However, most users are devoted
to certain standardized styles of working that
have been well worked out and permit the easy
sharing of material and of operating practices.
Here, for instance, is^tandard screen layout:

View i^oic^torT"
- W? u*»T „

you're

Yoot CORRECT T* WL$ 1

(what r«v rfp< i«a

WAY |( HtesJ

FlLt klliyJJDOk) L

FM_t UlUDoud 2.

Two separate panels of text appear, and links
may be shown on them. (Thus it's a thinkertoy—
see p. .) Two little windows at the top re¬
mind you of what you're seeing and what you're
asking for. We can't get into the rest of it
here

THE COMMAND LANGUAGE

NLS has a command language which all
users must learn. While it is a stream¬
lined and straightforward command language,
nevertheless it requires the user to type
in a specific sequence of alphabetical
characters every time he wants something
done. (This Is acceptable to computer-
oriented people; I suspect it would not
be satisfactory, say, for philosophers
and novelists. For designs oriented to
such users, see JOT (p P'5’0) and Carmody’s
System, nearby. Parallel Textface (p^Vj)
and,Th3 (p.^9T).)

Incidentally, NLS users may also employ
a cute little keyboard, something like a
kalimba, that allows you to type with one
hand ■ You simply type the six significant
ASCII bits (see chart p. ) in one "chonf*

— it sounds hard but is easy to learn.

Sample commands: I (insert), D (delete),

M (move or rearrange). Then you point with
the mouse.

MOUSE?

The Engelbart Folks have built a pointing
device, for telling the system where you're
pointing on the screen, that is considerably
faster and handier than a lightpen. (Unfor¬
tunately, I don't believe it’s commercially
available.) It's called The Mouse.

The Engelbart Mouse is a little box with
hidden wheels underneath and a cable to the
terminal. As you roll it, the wheel's turns
are signalled to the computer and the comput¬
er moves the cursor on the screen. It's fast
and accurate , and in fact beats a lightpen
hands down in working speed.

Through the comnand language, NLS allows
users to create programs that respond in all
sorts of ways; thus the fact that certain text¬
handling styles are standard (as in above il¬
lustration of screen layout) results more from
tradition than necessity.

£8

DM 4 7

it w

Hypertext 1* non-aaquential writing. It'* no good to u*,
though, un1e*• we can go instantly in a choica of direction*
froei a given point.

Thia of course can only naan on computer display screens.

Engelbart's systen, now, was mainly designed for people who
wanted to inmerse themselves in it and learn its conventions.
Indeed, it night be said to have been designed for a ccomrunity
of people in close contact, a sort of syatea of blackboards and
collaborative talking papers.

A more elemental system, with s different elant, was put
together at Brown U. on IBM equipment. Ha'll refer to It here
as "Carmody's System,” after the young programmer whose name
came first on the writeup.

Carmody's system runs on an IBM 360 with 2250 display.

While the 2250 is a fine piece of equipment, the quirks of the
360's opersting system (see p. *f f ) often delay the user by
making him wait, e.g., for someone else's cards to get punched
before it reeponds to his more imnediate uses) this is like
making ice-skatara wait for oxcarts.

Anyway, the system essentially imposes no structure on
the materiali it may consist of text segments of any length
and ties and links between them. An asterisk appearing any¬
where in one piece of text signals a possible jisnp, but the
reader doesn't necessarily know where toi rapping the asterisk
with the lightpen takes you there, however.

The same apparently la true of the data
structure. 1 used to be somewhat disturbed
at the way Engelbart 1 * text systems seem to
be rigorously hierarchical. This In fact is
the case, in the aense that having multiple
dlecrete levels is built deep into the system.
But it turns out to be harmless. The stored
text is divided by the storage techniques in¬
to multiple levels, corresponding to a Harvard
outline. Think of it as something like this:

1. HIERARCHICAL FORMAT

A. STORAGE

B. DISPLAY

C. LANGUAGE

But let's expand this example a little:

1. HIERARCHICAL FORMAT

A. STORAGE

Al. Everything in NLS is stored
with hierarchical codes.

A2. Their effect depends on the
display.

B. DISPLAY

Bl. The hierarchical codes of
NLS have no consequences In
particular .

B2. The hierarchical codes for
NLS can splay the material
out into a variety of dis¬
play arrangements.

B2A. They can be displayed
in outline form.

B2B. They can be displayed
In normal text form.

B2C. These dratted numbers
can even be made to
disappear.

C. LANGUAGE

Cl. The conaand language deter¬
mines what the display shows
of the hierarchical structure.

C2- What is shown can be deter¬
mined by s program in the
cosxaand language. (For in¬
stance, "how many levels
down" it is being shown).

C2A. This is four levels
down. (The earlier
example wasn’t.)

C3. The display format all de¬
pends on what display pro¬
gram you use, in the NLS
consaand language.

That's enough of that. I can't help re¬
marking that 1 still don't like that sort of
structuring, but it is deep Ln NLS, and if
you don’t like it either (poor deprived lucky
user of NLS) you can program it to disappear,
so it's hardly in your way.

BY THE BEARD OF THE PROPHET!

This is stark and simple. It could also get you good
and lost. However, a simple technique took care of that:
everyfcime the user jumped, the address of his previous
location was saved on a stack (see "The Magic of the Stack,”
p. f7_). The user also had a RETURN button: when he wanted
to go back to where he had last jumped from, the system
would pop the last address off the top of the stack, and
take him there. (This feature was adapted from my 1967
Stretchtext paper, and turned out to work out quite well
in practice.)

The system also had handy features for light-pen text
editing, and various nice printout techniques. All told,
it was a clean and powerful design. While it lacked higher-
level visualization facilities, like Engelbart's display of
Levels (see "outline” in Engelbart article) or collateral
display (see "Thinkertoys," pDATZ), it was in some ways suited
for naive users; that is, it was eventually fairly safe to use,
and could in large part be taught to rank beginners in a couple
of hours— provided they didn’t have to know about JCL cards.

It is left for the reader to figure out interesting uses
for it. How would you do collateral structures? How could
you signal to a reader which of several pieces of text a jump
was to?

(At least one real hypertext was actually written on this
system. It tied together a lot of patents for multilayer elec¬
trodes. Readers agreed that they could learn more from it about
multilayer electrodes than they had imagined wanting to know.)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Steven Carmody, Walter Gross, Theodor H. Nelson, David Rice

and Andries van Dam, "A Hypertext Editing System for the
360." In Faiman and Nievergelt (edo.). Pertinent Concepts
in Computer Graphics (U. Ill. Press ’69), 291-330.

Note: Mr. Gross now goes by the name of Lightning Clearwater.

Go/poi V

Thie oontinuee the remarks on Gordon Paak
begun on p.

Engelbart in German means Angelbeard; Doug
Engelbart is Indeed on the aide of the angels.

In building his mighty system he points a new
way for humanity. The sooner the better. Any
history of the twentieth century will certainly
hold him high. Few great men are also such
nice guya.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Douglas C. Engelbart, Richard W. Watson 6 James
C. Norton, "The Augmented Knowledge Workshop."
Proc NCC 73, 9-21.

Charles H. Irby, "Diaplay Techniques for Inter¬
active Text Manipulation." Proc NCC 74,

I will npw try to describe Pask's work
as he has explained it to me. Perhaps this
will be of some help to those who may have
been mystified or dumfounded by contact with
this fabulous man.

Cordon Pask's concern is abstraction and
how concepts are formed, whether in a creature
of nature or a robot or a computer program.
Abstraction is of interest primordially (as life
evolved thinking capacity), psychogenetically
(as the mind acquires new facilities, described
most peculiarly by Piaget), and epistemological¬
ly (how do we know? Like, how do we know . man?),
and methodologically (how can we most effectively
find out more?).

ilis interest, then, is in teaching by
allowing students to discover exact relations
in a specific subject matter by the very pro¬
cess of abstraction that is of so much interest.

The Aupnentation of Intellect. Infamous Ape Sequence from my elide-ahou.

what he does, then. Is prepare given
fields of learning so that they can be studied
by students using abstractive methods, without
guidance.

This preparation basically has two steps.
First he sets up the whole field. This is
done in collaboration with a "subject matter
Wh0 " ames the im P°rtant topics in
the field and states what interconnections
they have. The result is a complex graph
structure (see p. u> ) which Pask cills a
conversational domain . It comes out to huge
diagrams of labels and lines between them.

~^en Pask processes this structure to
make a more usable map of the field that he
calls an entailment structure . The processing
basically involves removing "cycles" in the
graph, thus making the structure hierarchical
in a slightly artificial way justified by what
the subject-matter-expert has said is the
structure of the field.

(This processing is carried out by a pro¬
gram called EXTEND.)

The resulting Entailment Structure is
then presented to the student as a great map
of the field which he may explore.

Pask intends that the student's explor¬
ations, will consist of testing analogies, or
what Pask calls morph isms . to find the exact
structures of knowledge he is supposed to
be acquiring. This knowledge will be in the
form of isomorphisms , or exact analogies, i.e.

Pask's overall system,examples of which
he has running in his laboratory in England,
he calls CASTE (Course Assembly System and
Tutorial Environment). A further development,
which is to be put on a PDP-11/45 computer
(see p. and p. H ) at the Brooklyn Chil¬
dren's Museum, is called THOUGHT-STICKER.

This program is intended to allow the demon¬
stration and testing of analogies directly,
by children.

PASK AND HYPERTEXT

Gordon Pask's work is remarkably similar
to my own stuff on hypertext.

Essentially Pask is reducing a field to
an extremely formal structure of relations
which may then be studied b£ the student , at
the student's initiative .

(What I don't quite understand is how the
analogies are to be explored and tested.)

Anyway, a principal point is that the
student is in control and may use his initia¬
tive dynamically; the subject is not artifi¬
cially processed into a presentational se¬
quence. Moreover, the arbitrary interconnec¬
tions of the subject, which are no respecters,
of the printed page, are recognized as the
fundamental structures the student must deal
with and come to understand. On all these
points Pask and I are in total agreement.

Indeed, his explorable systems-- (I don't
know if they will be what I elsewhere call
hypergrams or responding resources)-- will be
fascinating, fun and terrifically educational.
Because he is.

Now it turns out that this exactly com¬
plements the notion of hypertext as I have been
promulgating it lo these many years.

Hypertext is non-sequential text. If we
write a hypertext on something, it will be
most appropriate i7“we give it the general
interconnective structure of the field. In
other words, the interconnective structures
chosen for the textual parts are likely to have
the same connective structure (in general) as
Pask's Entailment Structure.

For another kind of hypertext, the antho-
logical hypertext built up of lots of other
writings, it is also reasonable to expect the
connective structures to cluster to the same
general form as Pask's entailment structure.

In other words, the very same field of
knowledge Pask is out to represent as an ex¬
plorable, formalized whole, I am out to repre¬
sent as an explorable jjnformalized whole, with
anecdotes, jokes, cartoons, "enrichment mater¬
ials," and anything else people might dig.

In still other words, let's have both
and call it a party.

You oan't read the eoreen here.
It eaye: C0GIT0 ERGO SUM

Actually it needs
the '2001' music.

MEDIA

fffLtv effect svrw

A^e THE NEW FRPNTlCJt

FANTICS

— 5UT >rs SHOWM^tf
TRKT'S PfEAMOOllT,

NOTAVW TtCMVjICM SWACfV

Ah, Love 1 could you end I with Him compile
To £T»»p this lorry Scheme of Tbingi entire,
Would not we (better it to bits—end then
Re mould it neerer to tbe Heert’s Desire I

Whet people don’t mi is how computer technology now
makes poealble the revision end Improvement— the trans¬
formation— of ell our media. It "eounde too technical,”

But thle le the baelc misunderstanding: the funda¬
mental laeuee are NOT TECHNICAL. To underatend this la
basically a matter of MEDIA CONSCIOUSNESS, not technical
knowledge.

, Uo4 # rtii itfl.

PR OBLEMS, PERILS, AND PROM ISES OP COMPUTER QRAPHTr*

John B. Macdonald
Research Leader
Computer Applications: Graphics
Western Electric Company
Engineering Research Center

A lot of people have acute media consciousness. But
some people, like Pat Buchanan and the couaaunards, suggest
that there la something shabby about this. Many think.
Indeed, that we live In a world of false Images promulgat¬
ed by "media," a situation to be corrected. But this Is
a misunderstanding. Many Images are false or puffy, all
right, but It la incorrect to suppose that there Is any
alternative. Media have evolved from simpler forme, and
convey the background Ideas of our time, aa well as the
fade. Media today focus the Impressions and Ideas that
In previous eras were conveyed by rituals, public gather¬
ings, decrees, parades, behavior in public, mummer’ troup¬
es... but actually every culture Is s world of Images. The
chieftain In his palanquin, the shaman with his feathers
and rattle, are telling us something about themselves and
about the continuity of the society and position of the
individuals in it.

K ? K aome aeri nieiona which may be

obvious but bear repeating.

1 * (l^profn® 18 th * appllcatlon of »cl«nce for

2. Computer craphlco does not make possible

anything that was previously Impossible; It
can only Improve the throughput of an existing
process, 0

3. A successful appllcatlon of computer graphics
Is when over a period or rive years the cost
savings from improved process throughput ex¬
ceed the costs of hardware, software, maln-
tenance and Integration Into an existing process

FANTICS

Eduard Fitzgerald.

Almost everyone seems to agree that Mankind (who?)
la on the brink of a revolution in the way information
Is handled, and that this revolution Is to come from
some sort of merging of electronic screen presentation
and audio-visual technology with branching, Interactive
computer systems. (The naive think "the" merging Is
Inevitable, as if "the" merging meant anything clear.

I used to think that too.)

Professions! people seem to think this merging will
be an intricate mingling of technical specialties, that
our new systems will require work by all kinds of commit¬
tees and consultants (adding and adjusting) until the Re¬
sults— either specific productions or overall Systems—
are finished. Then we will have to Learn to Use Them.

More consulting fees.

I think this Is a delusion and a con-game. I chink
that when the real media of the future arrive, the small¬
est child will know it right away (and perhaps first).
That, Indeed, should and will be the criterion. When you
can’t tear a teeny kid away from the computer screen,
we'll have gotten there.

We are approaching a screen apocalypse. The author's
basic view la that RESPONSIVE COMPUTER DISPLAY SYSTEMS
CAN, SHOULD AND WILL RESTRUCTURE AND LIGHT UP THE MENTAL
LIFE OF MANKIND. (For a more conventional outlook, see
box nearby, "Another Viewpoint.")

I believe computer screens can make people happier,
smarter, and better able to cope with the copious prob¬
lems of tomorrow. But only if we do right, right now,

WHY?

The computer's capability for branching among
events, controlling exterior devices, controlling
outside events, and mediating in all other events,
makes possible a new era of media.

Until now, the mechanical properties of exter¬
nal objects determined what they were to us and how
we used them. But henceforth this is arbitrary.

The recognition of that arbitrariness, and re¬
consideration among broader and more general alter¬
natives, awaits us. All the previous units and
mechanisms of learning, scholarship, arts, transac¬
tion and confirmation, and even self-reminder, were
based In various ways upon physical objects— the
properties of paper, carbon paper, files, books
and bookshelves. To read from paper you must move
the physical object in front of you. Its contents
cannot be made to slide, fold, shrink, become trans¬
parent, or get larger.

But all this Is now changing, and suddenly. The
computer display screen does all these things if desired,
to the same markings we have previously handled on paper.
The computer display screen is going to become universal
very fast; this Is guaranteed by the suddenly rising
cost of paper. And we will use them for everything.

This already happens wherever there are responding com¬
puter screen systems. (I have a friend with two CRTa on
his desk; one for the normal flow of work, and one to
handle interruptions and aide excursions.) A lot of
forests will be saved.

Now, there are many people who don't like this idea,
and huff about various apparent disadvantages of the
screen. But we can improve performance until almost
everyone is satisfied. For those who say the screens are
"too small," we can Improve reliability and backup, and
offer screens everywhere (so that material need not be
physically carried between them).

The exhilaration and excitement of the coming time
is hard to convey on paper. Our screen displays will be
alive with animation in their separate segments of activ¬
ity, and will respond to our actions as If alive physic¬
ally too.

Now the media, with all their quirks, perform the
same function. And If we do not like the way some things
are treated by the media, in part this stems from not
understanding how they work. "Media," or structured trans¬
mission mechanisms, cannot help being personalized by
those who run them. (Like everything else.) The problem
la to understand how media work , and thus balance our un¬
derstanding of the things that media misrepresent.

THOUGHTS ABOUT MEDIA:

1. ANYTHING CAN BE SAID IN ANY MEDIUM.

Anything can be said In any medium,and Inspiration
counts much more than 'science'. But the techniques which
are used to convey something can be quite unpredictable.

There has always been, but now is newly, a
UNITY OF MEDIA OPTIONS. You can get your message
across in a play, a tract, a broadside, a textbook,
a walking sandwich-board, a radio program, a comic
book or fumettl, a movie, a slide-show, a cassette
for the Audi-Scan or the AVS-10, or even a hypertext
(see p.}>*lH(,).

(But transposing can rarely preserve completely
the character or quality of the original.)

3. BIG AND SMALL APPROACHES

What few people realize is that big pictures can
be conveyed in more powerful ways than they know. The
reason they don't know it Is that they see the content
In the media, and not how the content Is being gotten
across to them— that in fact they have been given very
big pictures Indeed, but don’t know it. (I take this
point to be the Nickel-Iron Core of McLuhanlsm.)

People who want to teach In terms of building up
from the small to the large, and others who (like the
author) like to present a whole picture flrat , then
fill in the gaps, are taking two valid approaches.

(We may call these, respectively, the Big Picture ap¬
proach and the Piecemeal approach.) Big pictures are
Just as memorable as plcky-pieces 1JE they have strong
Insights at their major intersections.

By "fantics" I mean the art and science of getting
Ideas across, both emotionally and cognitively. "Presenta¬
tion" could be a general word for it. The character of
what gets across Is alvaya dual: both the explicit etruc-
ture^and feelings that go with them. These two aspects,
exactness and connotation, are an Inseparable whole; what
is conveyed generally has both. Tbe reader or viewer al¬
ways gets feelings along with Information, even when the
creators of the information think that Its "content" is
much more restricted. A beautiful example: ponderous
"technical" manuals which carry much more connocatlvely
than the author realizes. Such volumes may convey to
some readers an (Intended) Impression of competence, to
others a sense of the authors' obtuaeneas and non-lmaglna-
tlon. Explicit declarative structures nevertheless have
connotative fields; people receive not only cognitive
structures, but Impressions, feelings snd senses of things.

Fancies is thus concerned with both the arts of ef¬
fect— writing, theater and so on-end the structures and
mechanisms of thought, including the various traditions of
the scholarly event (article, book, lecture, debate and
class ). These are all a fundamentally inseparable whole,
and technically-oriented people who think that systems to
Interact with people, or teach, or bring up Information,
can function on some "technical" basis— with no tle-lns
to human feelings, psychology, or the larger social struc¬
ture— are kidding themselves and/or everyone else. Sys¬
tems for "teaching by computer," "information retrieval,"
and so on, have to be governed In their design by larger
principles than moat of these people are willing to deal
with: the conveyance of images. Impressions and ideas.

This Is what writers and editors, movie-makers and lectur¬
ers, radio announcers and layout people and advertising
people are concerned with; and unfortunately computer
people tend not to understand It for beans.

In fantics as a whole, then we are concerned with:

1. The art and science of presentation. Thus It na¬
turally includes

2. Techniques of presentation: writing, stage dir¬
ection, movie making, magazine layout, sound overlay,
etc. and of course

3. Media themselves, their analysis and design;
and ultimately

4. The design of systems for presentation. This
will of course Involve computers hereafter, both concept¬
ually and technically; since it obviously Includes, for the
future, branching and intricately interactive systems en¬
acted by programmable mechanisms, l.e. computers. Thus
computer display, data structures (and, to an extent,
programming languages and techniques) are all a part.

Fantlcs must sIbo include

5. Psychological effect and Impact of various presen¬
tational techniques— but not particular formal aesthetics,
as of haiku or musical composition. Where directly rele¬
vant fantlcs also includes

6. Sociological tie-ins'— especially Bupportlve and
dysfunctional structures, such as tie-ins with occupational
structure; sponsorship and couraercials; what works in schools
and why. Most profoundly of all, however, fantlcs must deal
with psychological constructs used to organize things:

7. The parts, conceptual threads, unifying concepts
and whatnot that we create to make aspects of the world un¬
derstandable. We put them Into everything, but standard¬
ize them in media.

For example, take radio. Given in radio— the tech¬
nological fundament— la merely the continuous transmission
of sound. Put into It have been the "program," the aer ¬
ial (and thus the episode ), the announcer , the theme song
and the musical bridge — conventions which are useful pre-
sentationally.

The arbitrariness of such mental construct# ahould
be clear. Their usefulness in mental organization perhaps
la not.

The question Is, then: HOW WILL WE USE THEM? Thus
the design of screen performances and environments, and
of transaction and transmission systems. Is of the high¬
est priority.

THE FRENCH HAVE A WORD FOR IT

In French they use the term 1*Informatique
to mean, approximately, the presentation of ln-
formation to people by automatic equipment.

Unfortunately the English equivalent,
informatics . has been preempted. There is a
computer programming firm called Informatics,
Inc., and when I wrote them about this in the
early sixties they said they did not want their
name to become a generic term. Trademark law
supports them in this to a certain extent.
(Others, like Wally Feurteig, want that to be
the word regardless.) But in the meantime
I offer up the term fantics, which is more
general anyhow.

<t. THE WORD-PICTURE CONTINUUM

The arts of writing and diagramming are basically
a continuum. In both cases the mental Images and cogni¬
tive structures produced are a merger of what la heard
or received. Words are slow and tricky for presenting
a lot of connections; diagrams do this well. But dia¬
grams give a poor feel for things and words do this
splendidly. The writer presents exact statements, in
an accord-structure of buts and lndeeds, molded in a
structure of connotations having (If the writer is
good) exact impreciseness . This is hardly startling:
you're always selecting what to say, and the use of
vague words (or the use of precise-sounding words va¬
guely) Is simply a flagrant form of omission. In dia¬
grams, too, the choice of what to leave in and out, how
to represent overweening condition*and forces and exemp¬
lary details, are highly connotative. (Great diagrams
are to be seen in the Scientific American and older
Issues of TIME magazine.)

This word-picture continuum is just a part of tha
broader continuum, which I call Fantlcs.

Let's take a surprise example, nothing electronic
about It.

Many "highways" are wholly fictitious— at least to
begin with. Let's say that a Route 37 le created across
the state: that number is merely a series of signs thst
users can refer to aa they look at their maps and travel
along.

However, aa time goes by, "Route 37" takes on s cer¬
tain reality aa a conceptual entity: people think of It
as a thing . People say "Just take 37 straight out"
(though It may twist and turn); groups like a Route 37
Merchants' Aasociation, or even a Citizens to Save Scenic
.37, may spring up.

What was originally simply s nominal construct, then,
becomes quite real aa people organise their lives around
it.

This all seems arbitrary but necessary in both high¬
ways snd radio. What, then, does It have to do with the
new electronic media?

Simply Chit: till now the structures of media somehow
aprang naturally from the nature of thinge. Now thejf don t
anymore . Radio, books and movies have a natural Inner dy¬
namic of their own, leading to atich conatructa. While
this may prove to be ao for computer media as well (—aa I
argued in "Getting It Out of Our System," cited p.
then again it may not. In other words, WE MUST ACKNOWLEDGE
THAT WE ARE INVENTING PRESENTATIONAL TECHNIQUES IN THE NEW
MEDIA, not merely transporting or transposing particular
things into them because they seem right. The paychologl-
cal constructs of man -machine systems may turn out^ t£ be,
jTfgely arbitrary . Thus bringing to terminal system* con¬
ventions like dialogue instruction ("CAl"), or arbitrary
restrlctiona of how thinge may be connected, presented or
written on the computer may be a great mistake.

The highway-number analogy continues. The older
highways had numbers for convenience, and our travels be¬
came organized around them, and particular highways (like
"U.S. 1" and "Route 66") came to have special character.

But now with the Interstates, a highway la a planned ,
sealed unit , no longer just a collection of roads gather¬
ed together under a name.

This unit, the Interstate, is not merely a psychologi¬
cal construct, but a planned structure. Knowing what works
and what doesn't in the design of fast highways, the Inter¬
states were built for speed, structured as closed units.
Designing them with limited access has been a conscious
decision in the system design for well-based reasons, no£
a chance structure brought in from horse—and buggy days.

Now, the constructs of previous media— writing, films,
other arta— evolved over tine, and in many cases may have
found their way to a "natural" form. But because of the
peculiar way that computer media are currently evolving
/—under large grants largely granted to professionals who
use very large words to promote the idea that their origi¬
nal professions are largely applicable-- ), this sort of
natural evolution may not take place. The new constructs
of computer media, especially computer screen-media, may not
have a chance to be thought out. We need designs for screen
presentations and their mixture— vignetting, Windows,
screen mosaics, transformed and augmented views, and the
rapid and comprehensible control of these views and windows.
We are still Jusc beginning to find clever viewing tech¬
niques, and have hardly begun to discover highly respon¬
sive forms of viewability and control (cf. collateration
in "Thinkertoys," and Knowlton's button-box

(See T. Nelson, "A Conceptual Framework for
Man-Machine Everything," cited p. , and material on
controls, below.)

THE MIND’S UNIFICATION

One of the remarkable things about the human mind
is the way it ties things together. Perceptual unity
comes out of nowhere. A bunch of irregular resi¬
dential and Industrial blocks becomes thought of as "my
neighborhood." A most remarkable case of mental uni¬
fication is afforded by the visage of our good friend
Mickey Mouse. The character is drawn in a most para¬
doxical fashion: two globelike protrusions (representing
the ears) are in different positions on the head , depend¬
ing on whether we view him from the front or the side.

No one finds this objectionable; few people even notice,
it seems.

THE PARADOXICAL AHATOMY OF MICKEY MOUSE

MICKEY MOUSE (frontal) (lateral)

POSSIBLE RECONCILIATIONS: Rolling

Diagonal Mounting Relative

What this shows, of course, is the way the mind can
unify into a consistent mental whole even things which
are inconsistent by normal rules (in this case, the rules
of three-dimensional structure).

Even perceptions are subject to the same principle
of unification. The fingernail is an excrescence with no
nerves in it; yet somehow you can feel things with your
fingernails — tying together disparate sensations into
a unified sense of something in the world (say, a coin
you're trying to pick up). In the same way, an experienc¬
ed driver feels the road ; in a very real sense, the car's
wheels and suspension become his own sensory extensions.

This principle of mental unification is what makeb
things come together, both literally and figuratively,
in a fantic field. A viewer sees two consecutive movie
shots of streets and unifies them into one street; controls,
if you are used to them, become a single fused system of
options; we can have a sense of a greater whole, of which
one view on a Bcreen Is a part.

W GiM, m wyiui

IS NO T m OOK_ SURS

iOT IN OU«.StRMeS.

CONTROLS: THEIR UNIFICATION AND PEEL

Controls are intimately related to screen presenta¬
tion, just as arbitrary, and just as important.

The artful design of control systems is a deeply
misunderstood area, in no way deconfused by calling it
human factors." There are many functions to be control¬
led, such as text editing operations, views of the uni¬
verse on a screen, the heading of a vehicle, the tilt of
an aircraft, the windage and adjustments of artillery,
the temperature of a stove burner and any other control¬
lable devices. And nowadays any conceivable devices
could control them— pushbuttons, knobs, cranks, wheels,
levers and joysticks, trigger, dials, magic wands, mani¬
pulation by llghtpen on CRT screens (see p^Ti), flicks
of the finger, the turning o_f the eyes (as in some ex¬
perimental gun-aiming devices), the human voice (but
that introduces problems— see p.J)*l3), keyboards, elec¬
tronic tablets, frigelbart mice and cbordwrlters, and so

The human mind being as supple as it is, anything
whatever can be used to control systems. The problem is
having it be a coaprehenalblc whole .

As already remarked, our ability mentally to unify
things is extraordinary. That we aomehow tie together
clutch, gear, accelerator and brake into a comprehensible
control structure to make care go and stop should amaze
and Instruct.

DM 49

;- , " ' lne accoroance-atructure of writing

Uee 'Writing," p.^iYl) movee it along emoothly, fantic
eaign that bulide from a we11-organized Internal dy-
namic ahouid confer on a fantic ay.tem the aame momentum
and clarity that carefully-organized writing hea.

Engineers and "human factora" people apeak as though
there were some kind of scientific or determinate way to
design control systems. Piffle. We choose a set of con¬
trols, much like an artist's Palette, on the basis of ge¬
neral appropriateness; and then try best and most artistic¬
ally to fit them to what needs doing.

The result must be conceptually clear and retroactive¬
ly "obvious"— simply because clarity is the simplest way
to keep the user from making mistakes. Clear and simple
systems are easier to learn, harder to forget, less likely
Co be screwed up by the user, and thus arc more economic¬
al— getting more done for the resources put in.

There is a sort of paradox here. The kinds of con¬
trols are totally arbitrary, but their unification in a
good system is not. Smoothness and clarity can come from
disparate elements. It is for this reason that I lay par¬
ticular stress on my JOT system for the input and revision
of text, using a palette of keys available on the simplest
standard computer terminal, the 33 Teletype. I cannot
make the final judgement on how good this system is, but
it pleases me. JOT la also an important example because
it suggests that a conceptually unified system can be
created from the artful non-obvious combination of loose
elements originally having different Intended purposes.

Mental analogy is an important and clear control
technique. We tend to forget that the steering wheel was
Invented , separately replacing both the boat's tiller and
the automobile's tiller. We also forget that the use of
such steering mechanisms must be actually learned by
children. Such continuous analogies, though, require cor¬
responding continuities in the apace to be controlled—
an important condition.

Simplicity and clarity have nothing to do with the
appearance of controls, but with the clarity and unique
locatability of individual parts. For this reason I find
deplorable the arrayed controls that are turning up, e.g.
on today's audio equipment. Designers seem to think
rows of things are desirable. On the contrary: the best
designed controls I ever used are on the Sony TC-50
pocket tap^ recorder

- frgm eh

but of course this is now phased out; Instead most cassette
recorders have five or six stupid buttons in a row. (Was
it too good to last?)

Spurious control elegance comes in many guises. Con¬
sider Bruce McCall's description of the Tap-A-Toe Futuroi-
dic Footless De-Clutching tm system. This was offered on
the fictitious 1934 Bulgemobiles, and allowed you to drive
the car with one pedal, rather than three (see box nearby).

Careless and horrible designs are not all fictitious.
One egregious example also indicates the low level of de¬
sign currently going into some responding systems: comput¬
er people have designed CRT writing systems for newspapers
which actually have a "kill" button on the con6ole, by
which authors would accidentally kill their stories. In
a recent magazine article it was explained thac the event¬
ual solution was to change the program so that to kill
the story you had to hit the "kill" button twice ■ To me
this seems like a beautiful example of what happens when
you let Insulated technical people design the system for
you: a "kill" button on the keyboard is about as intelli¬
gent as installing knives on the dashboard of a car,
pointing at the passenger.

There is another poor tendency. When computer pro¬
grammers or other technical people design particular
systems without thinking more generally, things are not
likely to be either simple or combinable. What may re¬
sult is intricate user-level controls for one par tic ular
function, controls that are differently used for another
particular function, aiaking the two functions not com¬
binable.

What makes for the beat control structures, then?

There is no simple answer. I would say provisionally
that it is a matter of unified and conspicuous constructs
in the mental view of the domain to be controlled,
corresponding to a well-distinguished and clearly-inter¬
related set of controlling mechanisms. But that is hardly
the last word on the subject.

THE ORGANIZATION OF WHOLENESS

It should be plain that in responding screen-
systems, "what happens on the screen" and "how the
controls respond" are not really distinguishable.

The screen events are part of the way the controls
respond. The screen functions and control functions
merge psychologically.

Now, there is a trap here. Just as the gas
pedal, clutch, gearshift and brake merge psychologi¬
cally, any control structure can merge psychological¬
ly. Clutch and gear shift do not have, for moat of us,
clear psychological relevance to the problem of con¬
trolled forward motion. Yet we psychologically inte¬
grate the use of these mechaniemB as a unified means
for controlling forward motion (or, like the author,
get an Automatic). In much the same way, any system
of controls can gradually come through use to have a
psychological organization, even spuriously. The trap
is that we so easily lose sight of arbitrariness and
even stupidity of design, and live with it when it
could be ao much better, because of this psychological
melding.

. ; - - —v.i complication! ot a system have

been carefully streamlined and amoothed back, at least
as they affect the user Consider the design of the JOT
text editing system (p.***?): while it la simple to tha
rHr! ^ omp “ ,:er P*°P le often reset to it with indignation
and anger because it hide, what are to them the signifi¬
cant features of computer text edltlng-^ipliclt pre¬
occupation with storage, especially the calling and re¬
vision of "blocks." Nevertheless, I say it is the de¬
tails at this level which must be smoothed back if we
are to make systems for regular people.

The same applies to the Th3 system (see p. Dlt <T*T )
which is designed to keep the user clear-minded as he
compares things in multiple dimensions. The mechanisms
at the computer level must be hidden to make this work.

FANTIC SPACE

Pudovkin and Eisenstein, great RuBaian movls-aakers
of the twenties, talked about "filmic space"— the imagin¬
ary space that the action seems to be in.

This concept extends Itself naturally to fantic space ,
the space and relationships sensed by a viewer of any me¬
dium, or a user in any presenting or responding environ¬
ment. The design of computer display systems, then, is
really the artful crafting of fantic space . Technicalities
are subservient to effects. (Indeed, I think computer
graphics is really a branch of movie-making.)

FANTIC STRUCTURE

The fantic structure of anything, then, consists of
its noticeable parts, interconnections, contents and ef¬
fects.

I claim that it is the fantic unity — the conceptual
and presentational clarity of these things— that makes
fantic systems— presentational systems and material—
clear and helpful, or not.

Let us take an interesting example from a system for
computer-assisted Instruction now under implementation.

I will not Identify or comment on the system because per¬
haps I do not understand It sufficiently. Anyway, they
have an array of student control-buttons that look like
this'. •

OEJ

tjeif

AS>VIC£

K\Ar

MKKR

easier

fcyiE

EMMP

[exa^le]

fMtr

The general thinking in this system aeema to be
that the student may get an overall organizing view of
what he is supposed to be learning (MAP); information on
what he is currently supposed to be about (OBJ); canned
suggestions based on what he's recently done (ADVICE).
Morjbver, he can get the system to present a rule about
the subjecc or give him practice; and for either of
these he may request easier rules or practice, or harder
rules (i.e., more abstruse generalities) or harder prac¬
tice.

For the latter, the student is supposed to hit
RULE or PRACT followed by HELP, HARDER or EASIER, viz.:

OBJ

Help

_/ l

AMcf

m }
— A

,C^IO»

bL_

tUl£ |

£XW

Now regardless of whether this is a uell-chouglt-out
way to divide up a subject— I'll be interested to see
how it works out— these controls do not seem to be well-
arranged for conceptual clarity. It seems to be the old
rowa-of-buttons approach.

I have no doubt that the people working on this sy¬
stem are certain this is the only possible layout. But
consider that the student's options might be clearer to
him, for instance, if we set it up as follows:

Gewftl't'eJ Aff

DM 50

Or Ilk* chi*:

Wh«t 1 am trying to show here ia that merely Che
arrangement of b uttons creates different fantic con¬
strue cT If you see this, you will recognize that
considering all the other options we have, designing
new media is no small matter. The control structures
merge mentally with the presentational structures.

The temptation to settle on short-sighted designs hav¬
ing shallow unity ia all too great.

FANTIC DESIGN

Fantic design is basically the planning and selec¬
tion of effects . (We could also call these "performance
values"— cf. "production values" in movies.)

Some of these intended effects are simply the com¬
munication of information or cognitive structure— "in¬
formation transfer," to use one of the more obtuse
phrases current. Other desirable effects Include orien¬
ting the user and often moving him emotionally, including
sometimes overwhelming or entrancing him.

In the design of fantic systems involving automatic
response, we have a vast choice among types of presenta¬
tional techniques, tricks that are just now becoming
understood. Not just screen techniques and functions,
but also response techniques and functions.

(If "feelie" systems are ever perfected, as in
Huxley's Brave New World, it's still the same In prin¬
ciple. See Wachspress, p. D*^.)

In both general areas, though-- within media, and
designing media-- it seems to me that the creation of
organizing constructs is the most profound problem.

In particular, the organizing constructs must not dis¬
tract, or tear up contents. An analogy: in writing, the
inventions of the paragraph, chapter and footnote were
inventions in writing technique that helped clarify what
was being expressed. Whet we need in computer-based
fantic design is inventions which do not artificially
chop up, constrain, or interfere with the subject (see
box, Procrustes, nearby).

I do not feel these principles are everywhere suf¬
ficiently appreciated. For instance, the built-in
structures of PLATO (see "Fantic Space of PLATO," p.

I*' 7.1) disturbs me somewhat in its arbitrariness— and
the way its control keys are scattered around.

Selection of point* and parts contribute* to both
•■pacts. If you are trying to keep the feeling of a
thing from being ponderous, you can never Include
everything you wanted, but must select from among the
explicit points and feeling-generators that you have
thought of.

2. The design of media themselves, or of media
subsystems, is not usually a matter of option. Book*,
movies, radio and TV are given. But on occasion, as
for world's fairs or very personal projects, we have

a certain option. Which allows things like:

Saellavlslon or whatever they called it:

movies with a smell-crack, which went out
Into the theater through odor generators.

Branching movies (see p.j>^iH^).

"Multi-media" (multiple audio tracks and si¬
multaneous slide projections on different
screens).

Stereo movies.

And so on. The thing about the ones mentioned ia that
they are not viable as continuing setups for repeated
productions. They do not offer a permanent wide market;
they are not stable; they do not catch on. Which is in
a way, of course, too bad.

But the great change is Just about now. Current
technicalities allow branching media — especially those
associated with computer screens. And it is up to us now
to design them.

3. MENTAL ENVIRONMENTS are working places for struc¬
tured activity. The same principles of showmanship apply
to a working environment as to both the contents of media
and the design of media. If media are environments into
which packaged materials are brought, structured environ¬
ments are basically environments where you use ncn- packag-
ed material, or create things yourself. They might also
be called "contentless media." The principles of whole¬
ness in structured environments are the same as for the
others, and many of our examples refer to them .

The branching computer screen, together with the
selfsame computer's ability to turn anything else on
and off as selected by the user, and to fetch up in¬
formation, yields a realm of option in the design of
media and environment that has never existed before.

Media we design for acreen-based computer syatems are
going to catch on widely, so we must be far more at¬
tentive to the options that exist in order to commit—
nationally, perhaps— to the best .

In tomorrow's systems, properly unified controls
can give us new flexibilities. If deeply well-designed,
these promise magnificent new capabilities. For in¬
stance, we could allow a musician to "conduct" the per¬
formance of his work by a computer-based music synthesis
system (see "Audio," p.>>*\il), perhaps controlling the
many qualities of the performance on a screen as he goes,
by means of such techniques as dimensional flip (see
P-ArtTl). (The tradition of cumulative audio synthesis,
as practiced in the fifties by Les Paul and Mary Ford,
and more recently by Walter Carlos and Mike Oldfield,
will take on a new fillip as multidimensional control
techniques become common.)

On* of the Intents of thl* book has been to orient
you to some of the possibilities snd some of the options,
considered generslly. There is not room, unfortunately,
to dlecusa more then one or two overall possibilities in
detail. The most successful such system so far has been
PLATO (discussed pp. DM18-19): other*

k,1 L LiPU f*r >*.«

V if* c*

NEW MEDIA TO LAST

What’s worse, we are confronted not merely with the
Job of using computers to present specific things. The
greater task ia to design overall computer media that
will last us into a more Intelligent future. Adrift in
a sea of ignorance and confusion, it is nevertheless our
duty to try to create a whole transportation system that
everybody can climb aboard. For the long run, fantic
syatems must be treated not as custom systems for explicit
purposes, but as OVERALL GENERAL DESIGNS WHICH WILL HAVE
TO TIE TOCETHER AND CATCH ON, otherwise collapse and
perish.

FINAL CONSEQUENCES.

It Beems to me certain that ve are moving toward
a generalized and universal Fantic system; people can
and should demand It. Perhaps there will be several;
but if so, being able to tie them together for smooth
transmission is essential. (Think of what it would be
like if there were two kinds of telephones?) This then
Is a great search and crusade: to put together truly
general media for^future, systems at which we can read,
write, learn and visualize, year after year after year .
The lnltlativea are not likely to come from the more
conventional computer people; some of them are part of
the problem. (Be prepared for every possible form of
aggressive defensiveness from programmers, especially:
"Why would you want that?" The correct answer is
BECAUSE, dammit!)

But this all means that interior computer technical¬
ities have to be SUBSERVIENT, and the programmers cannot
be allowed to dictate how it ia to behave on the basis
of the underlevel structures that are convenient to thoi.
Quite the contrary: from the fullest consideration of the
richest upper-level structures we want, we the users-to-
be must dictate what lower-level structures are to be
prepared within.

But this means you, dear reader, must develop the
fantic imagination. You must learn to visualize possible
uses of computer screens, so you can get on down to the
deeper level of how we are going to tie these things
together.

The designer of responding computer systems is
creating unified setups for viewing and manipulating
things— and the feelings, impressions and sense of things
that go with them. Our goal should be nothing less than
REPRESENTING THE TRUE CONTENT AND STRUCTURE OF HUMAN
THOUGHT. (Yes, Dream Machines indeed.) But it should
be something more: enabling the mind to weigh, puraue,
synthesize and evaluate ideas for a better tomorrow.

Or for any at all.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

But there is always something artificial— that is,
some form of artifice— in presentation. So the problem
is to devise techniques which have elucidating value but
do not cut connections or ties or other relationships
you want to save. (For this reason I suggest the reader
consider "Stretchtext," p. AM'®| , collateral linkage
(p- and the various hypergrams (p.1^).

These structures, while somewhat arbitrary and artifi¬
cial, nevertheless can be used to handle a subject
gently.)

An important kind of organizing construct is the
map or overall orienting diagram. This, too. Is often
partly "exact" and partly "artifice:" certain aspects of
the diagram may have unclear import but clear and help¬
ful connotation. (For instance, consider the "picture
systems" diagram on p. DM 2.0 — just what does the

vertical dimension mean? Yes, but what does it really
mean ?)

Responding systems now make it possible for such
orienting structures to be multidimensional and respon¬
ding (cf. the orienting function of the "dimensional
flip" control illustrated on p. DM JJ ).

Fantic design, then, is the creation either of
things to be shown (writing, movie-making, etc.) at the
lower end, or media to show things i£, or environments.

1. The design of things to be shown— whether
writing, movie-making, or whatever— is nearly always a
combination of some kind of explicit structure— an ex¬
planation or planned lesson, or plot of a novel— and
a feeling that the author can control in varying degrees.
The two are .deeply intertwined, however.

The author (designer, director, etc.) must think
carefully about how to give organization to what is
being presented. This, too, has both aspects, cognition
and feelings.

At the cognitive end, the author must concern him¬
self with detailed exposition or argument, or, in fiction,
Plot . But simply putting appropriate parts together is
not enough: the author must use organizing constructs to
continually orient the reader's (or viewer's) mind. Re¬
peated reference to main concepts, repeated shots (in a
movie) of particular locations, serve this function; but
each medium presents its own possible devices for this
purpose.

The organization of the feellops of the work
criss-crosses the cognitive; hut we can't get Into
it here.

6 L

Theodor H. Nelson, "A Conceptual Framework for
Man-Machine Everything." Proc. NCC 73.

-, "Computopia and Cybercrud." In Levien (ed.) f

Computers in Instruction . The Rand Corporation,

UOT- (Jv^ltrCf T®4.

Here’s hov: simple it is to create and edit text with the JOT system.

Since your typewriter is now a JOT machine, not every key does what it used to.

CREATING TEXT: just type it in.

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

Jf The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

REVIEWING A SENTENCE YOU JUST TYPED: the back-arrow takes you back, the space bar steps you

' through

sp Sp sp sp

/yr<r. (bell) The quick brown fox

DELETIONS AND INSERTIONS: the RUBOUT key rejects words you don’t want. To insert , merely type.
yiu 4- sp sp RUBOUT lithe sp sp sp sp sp sp

V (bell) The quick /brown/ lithe fox jumps over the lazy dog.

REARRANGING TEXT: first we make three Cuts in the text, signalled by free-standing exclamation

points.

>*■' iytt sp ! sp ! sp 1 fox

If fytt The 1 quick l lithe ! fox

TO REARRANGE IT, YOU TYPE: LINE FEED key. This exchanges the two pieces between the cuts.

CHECK THE RESULTS:

*- sp sp sp sp

(hell) The lithe quick fox

DM SI

T* NRKHI«- Her®

ft if flrtt-HttY-oUj ct* leir^
firrs f* Uve t» A«» you » ur.'ftwp,

«f 1 U* re*l IH-kj.]

I Another application of tiv: present invention i* nl*o in the srtj

of pictorial display, but offer# a greet variety of potential user choice* in
. simple circumstance. I call this the "uulking net" system bccauoc control is
effected through a changing network of choice# which step, or "walk,"
around the eercen.

j The problem of intricate ccaputor graphics may be phrased as

I fniinuc: riven that a digital system can hold a wide variety of graphical

II Materials ready to present, how my the user moot simply and conveniently
choose then" Indeed, how my the user keep track of what is happening, where

Either of these alternatives my continue with ite ovr.
developments and animations under control of lte own shank.

Several features of this control application are of special
Interest. Coe is that the presentation may be continuous in all directions,
aiding in continuous user orientation. Another le that presentations are
reversible In various vuyo, an aid both in user orientation and self-study.

(Not only is a demonstration reversible within » given shank, but the user may
back the pip through an intersection Into the antecedent shank—
which reappears at the Juncture as the llghtpen backs up— and the user ruy
continue to reverse the presentation through that preceding shank, or to re-ont«

lentil mechanism I have selected for this facility paradoxJ the intersection and nuke another choice, "the path not taken.*) These

t eally combines great \

latillty for sophisticated presentations with great

simplicity before the naive user. The idea is this: the user my caround a
continuing accession of changing presentations, Biking only one simple choice
at a time, yet receiving Intricate and rich animations with extremely clear

I presentation on the screen

of a forking set of arrows

la is this: along with an arbitrary graphic
p is continuously presented with the Image

The pip is a conventional ught-pen cursor. Tne "current shank" is a line
whose Implicit gradations control developrentc In the picture; and the choice
of arrows at tbo end of the current shank determine a discrete choice between
alternatives thut are to transpire.

The user, seizing the pip with the llghtpen, moves it (through
the usual llghtpen techniques) sideways along the current shank. Moving It In
the "forward" direction causes progressive developments In the picture, moving
It "backward" causes a reversal of animations and other previous developments.
j When the pip rcichsc the choice point in the forward direction,

the user may drag It (through the usual llghtpen techniques) along either of
the beckoning alternatives. This then causes further developments In the
presentation consonant with the line selected.

j "Developments” of the picture here Include expansion, contraction

sliding movements and frame-by-frame animation.

(These materials will have been, of course, explicitly input by
authors and artists.)

In a sample employment, consider a presentation on the subject
of Volcanoes. Let the first shank of the control net control the "rise of a
volcano fros the sea"— an undulating ocean surface pierced first by d wisp of
■aoke, then a growing peak, with rivulets of lava seen to run down its sides
and darken as they contribute to its growth.

dew ^ {,») jUl _

At the end of the first slunk, the user cay branth to two arrow:
labelled respectively WORD ORIGIR and BITERIOR. Either option continues the
presentation without a break, retaining much of the picture on the screen.
Selection of WORD OR IE JII caunes the word VOLCAKO to change to VULGAR, and a
picture of the god Vulcan Is seen to seize a lightning bolt rising from the
crater; text appears to explain this. Alternatively, if the user chooses
INTERIOR, the tubes and ducts within the volcano appear, and explanatory text

features allow the user clearly to repeat demonstrations as often aa he likes
and to explore numerous alternatives.

The displayed control net is thus to be understood as a large

network of choices, mostly unseen, whose c

:ntly visible portion "walks" aroun£

the screen as use progresses. Within this system, then, numerous variants are
possible. For Instance, the currently visible portion of the net may Itself
be whimsically incorporated in a picture, viz.:

CRpdlWSTeS THt 61 MT

The Greeks told of s giant*Procru*t*s (rhymes with
Rusty’s) who was very hospitable to passing travalers.

He would invite, indeed compel them, to sleep in his
bed. Unfortunately, because it was a vary odd bed, he
had to cut them up first...

Procrustes has haunted conversations ever since: and
any time we are forced to use categories that don’t pro¬
perly fit a subject, it seems like an invitation to the
Procrustean bed.

Hypertext systems at last offer total freedom from
arbitrary categorizing and chopping: but in some systems
for storing and presenting information, I can’t help hear¬
ing the whisk of Procrustes’ knife—

"Take new Tap-A-Toe Futuroidic Footless
De-Clutching. Instead of old-fashioned gas,
brake and clutch pedals that kept your feet
busier than a dance marathon, Tap-A-Toe
Futuroidic Footless De-Clutching offers the
convenience of Single Pedal Power Control--
combines all foot functions in one single
pedal!

"Think of it: one tap-- you go, moving
off faster than a harfly after Repeal.

"Two taps-- you change gears, as smooth
and automatic as a mortgage foreclosure.

"Three taps-- you stop quicker than the
U.S. economy.

"And that’s all there is to it. Tap-A-
Toe Futuroidic Footless De-Clutching with
Single Pedal Control is as easy and effort¬
less as the Jap march on Manchuria!"

Bruce McCall,

"1934 Bulgemobile Brochure,"

National Lampoon , May 74, 76-7.

STCU-WSIOM

system would allow you a "feelie" glove along
with your computer display— ths sort of thing
Mike Noll has been doing at Bell Labs.

Now, suppose you are pleying with a diagram
of a star on a computer display screan. It’s all
very well to see its layers, flowing arrows re¬
presenting convection currents, promontories end
so on— but soma things you ought to be able to
feel . For example, the mechanical resonance-prop¬
erties of stars. It would be nice to be able to
reach and grasp the star, to squeeze it and feel
its pulsations as it regains its shape. This
could be done in the glove— et the same time the
Image of the giova grasps the etar on the screen.

l Uvt c «J)sJ f

SHOtiMfKMirMOlKXSY?
iWTCUfCTRON'Cf? [s. <W]
THOO&HTOMMioH?

/^DOT THE

'FAN TICS.’

First of all, I fee] that very few
people understand what interactive computer

thinks°lt^# e

I think it's all show business
PENNY ARCADES are the model for interactive
computer systems, not classrooms or libraries
or imaginary robot playmates. And computer
graphics is an intricate branch of movie¬
making .

Okay, so I wanted a term that would
connote, in the most general sense, the show¬
manship of ideas and feelings-- whether or not
handled by machine.

I derive "fantics" from the Greek words
"phainein" (show) and its derivative "phantas-
tein" (present to the eye or mind).

fantastic . fantasy, phantom
what is~shown~ ; in medical i
to an opaque object drawn a
"phantom limb" is an ampute
that the severed limb has b
fantast is a dreamer.

1» phantom . ("Phantom" means
medical illustration it refer:

transparent; a
s temporary feeling
n restored.) And a

The word "fantics" would thus include
the showing of anything (and thus writing
and theater), which is more or less what I
intended. The term is also intended to
cover the tactics of conveying ideas and
impressions, especially with showmanship
and presentational techniques, organizing
constructs, and fundamental structures
underlying presentational systems.

Thus Engelbart's data hierarchy (P.^Ht-T)
SKETCHPAD’S Constraints (p.jM>), and PLATO’S
fantic spaces (p.^MK-^ are fantic constructions
that need to be understood if we are to under¬
stand these systems and their potential usages.

Livermore Labs, those hydrogen-bomb
design people, will have a "Laboratory for
Data Analysis," an opulent facility for ex¬
perimenting with multidimensional visualization.

One of your jolly Ironies. I have seen pic¬
tures of beautiful multibutton control handles which
were designed for project SMASH, would you believe
Southeast [Asia] Multisensory Armament System for
Helicopters. Aargh.)

The best with the worst.

rerything is deeply intartwingled.

Designing screen systems that focus
the user's thought on his work, with help¬
ful visualizations and no distractions, is
the great task of fantic design.

In a system I designed for CRT motion-
picture editing, the user could maipulate
written descriptions on the screen (corres¬
ponding to the usual yellow-pad notes). To
see the consequences of a particular splice,
for instance, the editor would only have to
draw a line between two annotated lines re¬
presenting shots. Trim variations could be
seen by moving this cut-line (illustrated).

Not long after, CBS and Memorex did in¬
troduce a system for movie-editing by CRT--
but I've heard that in their system the user
has to actually deal with numbers. If so,
this is missing the whole point.

/ HwW' IK Iko* F»«y

f KONSTtri AfPAOACRejV'

jgioscyr os HCxp:ijc

(The P>th unchosen fades from the i

i doea the previous

Of course, to build such a responding glove,
particularly one that gave you eubtle feelinge
beck in your fingere, would probably be very ex¬
pensive. But it’s the kind of poeeibility people
should start considering.

DM 5 Z

*THmKt£roys*

Ciur greatest prooiems involve thinking and the
visualization of complexity.

By "Thinkertoy" I mean, first o£ all, a system
to help people think. {'Toy' means it should be easy
and fun to UBe.) This is the same general idea for
which Engelbart, for instance, uses the term "aug¬
mentation of intellect."

But a Thinkertoy is something quite specific!

I define it as a computer display system that helps
you envision complex alternatives .

The process of envisioning complex alternatives
is by no means the only important form of human
thought; but it is essential to making decisions, de¬
signing, planning, writing, weighing alternate theor¬
ies, considering alternate forms of legislation, doing
scholarly research, and so on. It is also complicated
enough that, in solving it, we may solve simpler prob¬
lems as well.

Me will stress here some of the uses of these sy¬
stems for handling text , partly because I think these
are rather interesting, and partly because the com¬
plexity and subtlety of this problem has got to be
better understood: the written word is nothing less
than the tracks left by the mind, and so we are really
talking about screen systems for handling ideas, in
all their complexity.

Numerous types of complex things have to be inter-
compared, and their relations inter-comprehended. Here
are a few of the many types:

Successive drafts of the same document.

Pairs of things which have same parts the
same, some parts different <contracts, holy books,
statutes of different states, draft versions of

Under examination these different types of inter-
ccraparison seem to be rather different. Now, one ap¬
proach would be to create a different data structure
and viewing technique for each different type of complex.
There may be reasons for doing that in the future.

For the present, however, it makes sense to try to
find the most general possible viewing technique: one
that will allow complex intercomparisons of all the
types mentioned, and any others we might run across.

One such technique is what I now call collatera-
tion, or the linking of materials into collateral struc¬
tures, as will be explained. This is fairly straight¬
forward if you think enough about the problem; Engel¬
bart discovered it independently.

Let us call two structures collateral if there are
links between them, connecting a selected part of one
with a selected part of the other. The sequences of
the connected parts may be different. For simplicity’s
sake, suppose each one is a short piece of writing.

(We will also assume that there is some convenient form
of rapid viewing and following between one end of a link
and another.)

Now, it will be noted first off that this is an ex¬
tremely general method. By collateral structuring we
can easily handle the equivalents of: tables of contents;
indexes; comments and marginalia; explanations, exegesis,
explication; labeling; headings; footnotes; notes by the
writer to himself; comments and questions by the reader
for later reference; and additional details out of se¬
quence .

Collateration , then, is the creation of such
multiple and viewable links BETWEEN ANY TWO DATA
STRUCTURES, in principle. It is general and powerful
enough to handle a great variety of possible uses in
human intellectual endeavor, and deserves consider¬
able attention from researchers of every stripe.**

The problem then, is how to handle this for
rapid and convenient viewing and whatever other work
the user wants to do— writing and splicing, inter¬
comparing, annotating and so on. Two solutions ap¬
pear on this spread: The Parallel Textface^, design¬
ed as a seminal part of the Xanadu system (see
which I hope will be marketed with that system in the
near future, and a more recent design which I've work¬
ed on at the University of Illinois, the 3D Thinkertoy
or Th3.

CLARITY AND POWER

We stressed on the other side of the book that
computer systems must be clear, simple and easy to use.
Where things like business uses of computers are con¬
cerned, which are intrinsically so simple in principle,
some of the complications that people have been forced
to deal with in ill-designed computer systems verge on
the criminal. (But some computer people want others
to think that's the way it has to be. "Your first
duty is to keep your job, right?" one computer person
said to me recently. "It wouldn't do to set up systems
so easy to use that the company wouldn't need you any¬
more." See "Cybercrud," p.8.)

But if it is desirable that computer systems for
simple-minded purposes be easy to use, it is absolutely
necessary that computer systems for complicated purposes
be simple to use- If you ait wrangling over complex al¬
ternatives— say, in chess, or in a political simula¬
tion game (see "Simulation," p. %% ), or in the throes
of trying to write a novel, the last thing you will tole¬
rate is for your computer screen to introduce complica¬
tions of its own. If a system for thinking doesn't
make thinking simpler— allowing you to see farther and
more deeply— it is uselss, to use only the polite terra.

But systems can be both powerful and simple at
the same time. The myth that things have to be com¬
plicated to do anything for you is pernicious rubbish.
Well-designed systems can make our mental tasks lighter
and our achievements come faster.

It is for this reason that I contend A the reader
these two designs of mine: as examples of user-level
control and viewing designs— fantic environitents, if
you will (see p^Ki)— that are pruned and tuned to
give the user great control over the viewing and cross¬
consideration of intricate alternatives, without com¬
plication. I like to believe that both of these, in¬
deed, are ten-minute systems— that is, when we get
them running, the fange of uses shown here can be taught
to naive users, in ten minutes or less .

It is because of my heartfelt belief in this kind
of simplicity that I stress the creation of prefabrica¬
ted environments, carefully tuned for easy use, rather
than the creation of computer languages which must be
learnt by the user, as do such people as Engelbart (see
p.»>M&) *nd DeFanti (see p.^^O. Now, their approach
febvioualy has considerable merit for sophisticated users
who want to tinker repeatedly with variant approaches.

For people who want to work incessantly in an environ¬
ment, and oil other things— say writers— and are ab¬
sent-minded and clumsy and nervous and forgetful (like
the present author), then the safe, prefabricated en¬
vironment, with thoroughly fail-safe functions and ut¬
terly memorable structural and control interrelation¬
ships, is the only approach.

* In my 1965 paper (see bibliography) I called collateral
structures zlppered lists .

A group at Brown University has reportedly worked
along these lines since I worked with them, but due
to certain personal animosities I have not kept up
with their developments. It will be interesting to
see what kind of response they can get out of the
IBM systems they are using.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Theodor H. Nelson, "A File Structure for the complex,

the Changing and the Indeterminate." Proc. ACM 65.
84-100.

-, "Simplicity Versus Power In User Systems."

Unpublished.

DECISIOn/CREATIVITY SYSTEMS

Theodor H. Nelson
19 July 1970

WE OFTEN WANT TO SAVE ALTERNATIVES.

And {lastly it my [biarl] tie frttdd,
Ami stilt mUl « m t

[JmJ 4iiV mi with bir swimming ryts ]

Tbtt / [attld ] rttbtr fit! tbtn it
[Her grntft Bntm riu ,—]

[ And wrts sfrm, strttt (y tbtirt,'] j c^w, krWii a *• mol
[W/] /• U brr Inst with mtidrt fridt i
And n / wit my Gtttvmt,

My [irigbi] 6- Jtvt/y ■Bridt.'}

From Coleridge's Poems: A Facsimile
Reproduction of the Proofs
and MSS, of some of Che Poems .
(Folcroft, 1972.)

It has been recognized from the dawn of computer display that the
grandest and most important use of the computer display should be to
aid decisions and creative thought. The work of Ivan Sutherland (SKETCHPAD)
and Douglas Engelbart have really shown how we may use the display to
visualize and effect our creative decisions sviftly and vividly.

For some reason, however, the most important aspect of such systems
has been neglected. We do not make important decisions, we should not
make delicate decisions, serially and irreversibly. Rather, the power of
the computer display (and its computing and filing support) must be so
crafted that we may develop alternatives, spin out their complications
and interrelationships, and visualize these upon a screen.

No system could do this for us automatically. What design and
programming can create, however, is a facility that will allow us
to list, sketch, link and annotete the complexities we seek to under¬
stand, then present "views" of the complexities in many different forms.
Studying these views, annotating and refining, we can reach the final
designs and decisions with much more in mind than we could otherwise
hold together in the imagination.

Some of the facilities that such systems must have include the
following:

Annotations to anything, to any remove.

Alternatives of decision, design, writing, theory.

Unlinked or irrerrular pieces . hanging as the user wishes.

Multicoupling , or complex linkage, between alternatives, annota¬
tions or whatever.

Historical filing of the user's actions, including each addition
and modification, and possibly the viewing actions that preceded them.

Frozen moments and versions , which the user may hold as memorable
for his thinking.

Evolutionary coupling , where the correspondences between evolving
versions arc automatically maintained, and their differences or relations
easily annotated.

In addition, designs for screen "views", the motion, appearance
and disappearance of elements, require considerable thought and imagi¬
nation.

The object is not to burden the user, or make him aware of complex¬
ities in which he has no interest. But almost everyone in intellectual
and decision pursuits has at some time an implicit need for some of
these facilities. If people knew they were possible, they would demand
them. It is time for their creation.

A full-fledged decision/creativity system, embracing both text and
graphics, is one of the ultimate design goals of Project XANADU.

We might also think of them as systems for

OF UX& e*y>s.

DM 53

This user-level system is intended to aid in
all forms of writing and scholarship, as well as
anywhere else that we need to understand and mani¬
pulate complex clusterings of text (i.e., thought ).

It will also work with certain animated graphics.

The Parallel Textface, as described here,
furnished the initial impetus for the development
of the Xanadu tm system (see p.^lSSfe). Xanadu was
developed, indeed, originally for the purpose of
implementing some of these functions, but the two
split apart. It turned out that the Parallel
Textface required an extremely unusual data struc-
structure and program techniques; these then became
the Xanadu system. As developed in the final
Xanadu design, they turn out to handle some very
unusual kinds of screen animation and file retrieval.
But this grew out of structuring a system to handle
the functions described here.

Thus the Parallel Textface basically requires
a Xanadu system.

It is hoped that this system can be sold com¬
plete (including minicomputer or microprocessor--
no connection to a large computer is required) for
a few thousand' dollars by 1976 or 1977. See p.

(Since "business people" are extremely skeptical
as to whether anybody would want such a thing, I
would be interested in hearing expressions of in¬
terest, if any.)

<£>W72~ T t * aioN

As shown here, the screen presents two panels
of text; more are allowed. Each contains a seg-
ment of a longer document. ("Page" would be an im-
proper term, since the boundary of the text viewed
may be changed instantly.)

The other odds and ends on the screen are hid¬
den keys to control elements which have been made

distraction tHl5 lllustration )• J ust t0 lessen the

Panel boundaries and control graphics may b->
made to appear by touching them w.lU Ut lijktpe*.

fe;T

iT:

T. WtLSori

ROVING FUNCTIONS

x , i The te * t raoves on the screen! (Essential 1
contain^ 1 " ' X ? ht han ? corner each text panel *
S inconspicuous control diagram. The
tjorizontai extension is a movable control

oin\m T !i e A SeT> W MM h B hlS light pen, may move the
doWn ^ , U P" causes the text to move
smoothly upward (forward in the material), at a
rate proportional to how far you push the pip-
no? ^ aU ^ eS 14 m ? ve back * ( Note that we do
here t0 line -b/-line jumps, but

a h ! Creen motlon » "hich is essential in

a high-perfor^nce system. If the text does not
move, you can't tell where it came from.)

PARALLEL TEXTFACE (1971)

Real person sits at
cardboard Xanadu mockup.

fwf Wt

DERIVATIVE MOTION: when links run sequential¬
ly, connecting one-after-the-other on both sides,
the contents of the second panel are pulled along
directly: the smooth motion in one panel is match¬
ed in. the other. This may be called derivative
motion , between independent text (being handled
directly with the lightpen) and dependent text
(being pulled along). The relationship may be re¬
versed immediately, however, simply by moving the
lightpen to the control pip of the other panel,
whose contents then become the independent text.

Irregularities in the links will cause the
independent text to move at varying speeds or jump,
according to an average of the links' connectivity.

"Nice keyboard. But
what happened to
your typewriter?"

Two panels are about
right for a 10 x 10
screen.

Independent text pulls
dependent text along.
Painted streaks simulate
motion, not icicles.

— I 4*t**V*'t

(5 r\7t T.nttjsH

If no links are shown, the dependent text just
stops.

©nil

Collateral links between material! in the
two panels are displayed as movable lines bet¬
ween the panels. (Text omitted in this diagram;
panel boundary has been made to appear.)

Some links may not have both their endpoints
displayed at once. In this case we show the in¬
complete link as a broken arrow, pointing in the
direction of the link's completion.

The broken arrow serves not merely as a vi¬
sual pointer, but as a jump-marker leading to the
linked material. By zapping the broken arrow with
the lightpen, the user summons the linked material--
as shown by the completion of the link to the other
panel. (Since there has been a jump in the second
panel, we see that in this case the other link has
been broken.)

When such links lead to different places, both
of these destinations may nevertheless be seen at
once. This is done by pointing at both broken links
in succession; the system then allows both links to
be completed, breaking the second panel between the
two destinations (as shown by dotted line across
panel).

9 L

DM S«

©im T.ticuori

FAIL-SAFE AND HISTORICAL FEATURES.

In systems for naive users, it is essential
to safeguard the user from his own mistakes. Thus
in text systems, commands given in error must be
reversible. For instance, Carmody's system (see
p. DM 1 ) ^) requires confirmation of deletions.

Another highly desirable feature would allow
the user to view previous versions, to see them col¬
laterally with the corresponding parts of current
versions, and even go hack to the way particular
things were and resume work from the previous
version.

In the Parallel Textface this is all com¬
prised in the same extremely simple facility. (Ex¬
tremely simple from the user's point of view, that
is. Inside it is, of course, hairy.)

In an egregious touch of narcissistic humor,
we use the very trademark on the screen as a control
device (expanded from the "X" shown in the first
panel 1

T-

Actually the X in "Xanadu 1 ®," as it appears
on the screen, is an hourglass, with a softly fall¬
ing trickle of animated dots in the lower half, and
Sands of Time seen as heaps above and below. These
have a control, as well as a representative, func¬
tion.

TO UNDO SOMETHING, YOU MERELY STEP "BACKWARD
IN TIME" by dagging the upper part of the hourglass
with the lightpen. One poke, one editing operation
undone. Two pokes, two operations.

You may then continue to view and make changes
as if the last two operations had never taken place.
This effectively creates an alternative time-line.*
However, if you decide that a previously undone edit
operation“should be kept after all, you may step
forward -- stepping onto the previous time-line--
oy using the lower half of the hourglass.

Ccmisiok Tre^

_ D f ee *; his clarified in a master time diagram
nIv^r V « S1 ^ n k Tree ? hlC £ may be summoned to the screen,
ve^sion^r! 0 ?;-! exa ! n P le ** see that three

and Still "current," various other starts

and variations having been abandoned. (The sha B Ey
fronds correspond to short-lived variations, reiSlt-
operations which were then reversed. In
teri-Sj*footS{;!) to use Gerald's

©'174, r.«cut»«

~ y

xt) ^7

' ' 0^,.* afiftKj +. L,»k

... and see them displayed collaterally; and revise
them further.

Separate portions of the Edit Rose invoke
various edit operations. (You must also point with
the lightpen to the necessary points in the text:
once for insert, twice for Delete, three or four
times for Rearrange, three times for Co*w 1

GETTING AROUND

The user may have a number of standby layouts,
with different numbers of panels, and jump among
them by stabs of the lightpen.

Importantly, the panels of each can be full ,
each having whatever tne~ contents were when you last
left it.

-- - - ->£ —M—r-

©K72- r.*JCCJc«

The File Web tm is a map indicating what
(labelled) files are present in the system, and
which are collaterated.

The File Star tm is a quick index into the con¬
tents of a file. It expands as long as you hold
the lightpen to the dot in the center, with various
levels of headings appearing as it expands. Natur¬
ally, you may jump to what you point at.

©Mil. T-HiLfrm

for organizing by multiple outlines or tables
of contents;

©l^7l T. NJUpM

and as a Thinkertoy, organizing complex alternatives.
(The labels say: "Conflicting versions," "New account
of conflicts," "Exposition of how different accounts
deal with objections," "Improved, synthesizing account,

In other words, in this approach we annotate and
label discrepancies, and verbally comment on differen¬
ces in separate files or documents.

In ways this may seem somewhat obtuse. Yet above
all i_t is orderly , and the complex of collateral files
has a clarity that could be all-too-easily lost in sy¬
stems which were programmed more specifically to each
problem. *<*/.*.'

<€)i172. r-mw-ntf

The user-- let’s say he is a thoughtful writer--
may define various Versions or Drafts, here marked
on the Revision Tree.

©\ri2. T-UccyoU

He may, indeed, define <
different versions defined ai
Tree...

>1 lateral linkages between
various Times in the

EDITING

Rather than giving the user anything complicat¬
ed to learn, the system is completely’ visual. All
edit controls are comprised in this diagram, the Edit
Rose tm . Viz..:

S L

The fundamental strength of collateration,
seen here, is of course that any new structure
collateral to another may be used as a table of
contents or an outline, taking the user instantly
to parts which are of interest in some new context.

* Oddly, this has the same logical structure as
time-travel in science-fiction.

There are basically three alternate premises of
of time-travel: 1) that the past cannot be changed,
all events having preceded the backstep; 2) that the
past can be changed; and 3) that while time-travelers
may be deluded into thinking (2), that (1) is really
the case-- leading to various appointment-in-Samarra
plots.

Only possibility (2) is of interest here, but
there are various alternative logics of mutability and
time-line stepping. One of the best I have seen is in
The Man Who Folded Himself by David Gerrold (Popular
riFrary ,n?73) : logic expounded pp. 64-8. I am be¬
mused by the parallel between Gerrold's time-controls
and these, worked out independently.

DM 55

h 1UY W

TCXT SfUtM.

RteA IV't at 'i® or J« r, l-

MW.***/.—I

This design, TK3 (Thinkertoy In
3 dimensions), Is one I have been work¬
ing at while on the faculty of the Univ¬
ersity of Illinois. It la designed spe¬
cifically for implementation using De-
Fanti's CRASS language (see p.J>"V3)),
and the Vector Ceneral 3D display (aee
p.*^D). Whether It will ever be actually
programmed depends, of course, on numer¬
ous factors.

It la meant to be a very hlgh -
power thinkertoy, suitable for experimen¬
tation with creative processes, especially
writing and three-dimensional dealgn.

(There is no room to discuss the latter
here.) It Is suited tepeeially to the visual¬
ization of tentative structures In amorphous
clusters. In some of its features It goes
considerably beyond the more "coraoercial"
thinkertoy system, the Parallel Textface
(elsewhere in this spread).

Nevertheless, the same design criteria
apply: a well-designed computer environment
for any purpose should be learnable In ten
minutes ; otherwise the designer has not been
doing his job. (I mean It would be learnable
in ten minutes If you and I had It in front
of us, working. This description will have
to be weird and abstruse, I'm sorry to say.)

This system is designed around a three-
dimensional display screen (the Vector Gener¬
al display, as manlpulable by thq^RASS lan¬
guage).

The crucial point here ia that it'a unified
tn the user: every version appears on a side of
a box; and a typeset version Is simply a magni¬
fied two-dimensional view in which the two dimen¬
sions are "position in overall text" (vertical)
and "position on line" (horizontal).

Each aide of a box may have a different
view projected to it. This means that as many
aa three views of a specific clutter may be
seen at once. However, for consistency these
muat have appropriately^coenon dimensions.

By rotation and zooming the user may focus
on the original pieces, and work with them, writ¬
ing and revising.

Moreover, by using a combination of zoom
and hardware clipping (aa available on this
equipment), the user may restrict his work to
a specific range of material on particular di¬
mensions.

GALAXY AND BOX

There are basically two views of what
you are working with: the Galaxy and the Box.
They appear in various manifestations, allow¬
ing you to study discrete relations and struc¬
tures In the material; various "dimensions" of
the material; alternate versions and drafts to
be made from the material; and the complex col-
lateration (see under "Thinkertoys") of differ¬
ent structures.

Now, most people do not think of text
as three-dimensional. Laymen think of it as
two-dimensional, since it's usually printed
on rectangular pages. Computer people or¬
dinarily think of it as one-dimensional, as
a long string of characters and spaces—
essentially what you'd get If you printed
things In one line on a long, long ribbon.
Well, frankly, I don't think of text as
three-dimensional either; but like anything
else, it has numerous qualities or dimen¬
sions, any three of which it's nice to be
able to view at once (see "Dimensional Flip,")
And that's essentially the idea:
the three dimensions we'll look at at any
one time will be a particular view of a larger
whole.

Now, the basic torm of storage will be
one of those Nelson-structures that drives
computer people batty. Specifically, the
basic data structure will be clusters of

In what follows we will discuss the screen
functions but not the control structures, which
have not firmed up particularly.

1. GALAXY VIEWS.

The points are seen as a cloud of dots on
the screen. If no view coordinates are supplied,
the dots will be randomly positioned.

A. "Star Trek" effect.

Under a user's zoom control, the dots
fly apart as if he is hurtling through
space.

B. MAGNIFICATION. The user may "magnify"

the dots, making each show its keywords
further text, and on up to the full
Piece.

C. ROTATION. The 3D structure of the dots

in space may be seen by the user at
any time through short rotations ■

Puns sometimes reflect a higher reality.

Now It turn6 out that this structure in fact
reflects a great Folk Truth: written discourse
does in fact consist of "points" which you
Intend to get across . That we here intend to
have them rotate as dots upon a screen reflects
this structure.

Writing is, in fact, a projection from
the Intended "points" to a finished exposition
which embraces them. Now, this is very like
the view of language held in modern linguistics,
namely, that a finished sentence is a "surface
structure" constructed out of basic sentence
kernels chewed up by certain transfonnatlons .
Well, I am just pointing ouc here that writing
is a surface structure of "points" which have
been embedded and spliced in a structure of
transitions, accordance-notes and so forth (see

The general idea of the Th3 system, then,
is that the user may view the "points" he
wishes to make, variously upon the 3D viewing
surface. Successive drafts, then, will all be
projections , geometrically, from this interior
structure of points.

Finally, the unifying idea that gives the
system simplicity is this: all views will be on
faces of a cube.

(FURTHER TECHNICALITIES OF THESE 'POINTS':
Each point may have a value (numerical pa¬
rameter) in any of a number of dimensions
(which number may itself change). Such
values may be null , as distinct from zero,
showing that the point has no position on
that particular scale.

Associated with each point may be one
or more pieces and scraps or written mater¬
ial. Such scraps may be just phrases or
single words. (Indeed, such scraps may be
associated not Just with a point, but with
several apeclflc values of a point.) Each
scrap may also contain keywords .

Discrete relations between points may
also be defined. There may be a variety
of typeB of relation, which either exist
between two points of don't.)

0. Any relations that exist among the

Points, Insofar as they have been logg¬
ed into the system, may be displayed

E. The user may sort the points by moving

them with a llghtpen.

F. The user may write within the individ¬

ual pieces and splice them together,
combining llghtpen and keyboard oper¬
ations.

2. BOX VIEWS

In the Galaxy Views, the individual Points
simply swarm about with no definable position.

'Box Views" allow you to order the points on any
dimensions that have meaning to you, in an ar¬
bitrary coordinate-space.

The box is more than a mere measurement 1
frame. On request the user may see the points
projected on a specific face of the box (ortho-
graphically); and on request he may also see pro¬
jection lines between a box-face and its cor¬
responding point in the point cluster.

"Magnifying^' as before, will create a view
of the text: but in the box mode of viewing, the
text appears on the aide of the box . That is,
the inner view will project to the outside,
yielding a draft . Naturally, this is the current
assembly of your pieces; If certain coordinates
are selected it is even a "typeset" version.

(Note: Vector General hardware does not al¬
low character rotation; only keyword and headline
rotation is possible, through software character
generation. Thus text pieces on the side of a
box show certain freaky movements if the side is
not viewed square-on.)

^ At the 1971 Spring Joint Computer Conference, I think it was,

I was heckled by a linguist who accused me of being "unimaginative,"
Insisting, further that writing is merely an extension of speech
and thus merely" the application of further transformations; and
he claimed further that what the user therefore needs is an input
language to specify these transformations. This view, while inter¬
esting, is wrong.

A but/indeed control language might be interesting, however.

[Appended by the

however-operation, a postfix "but." See "Writing,’' p. DM^.]

. " \

•to,

COLLATERAL CALAX1ES AND BOXES.

Viewing of collateral structures works
through the same mechanism. Galaxies and
boxes may be collatereted:

COMPLICATED NOTE: The extenalon of these
mechanisms to pictorial graphics in two
and three dimensions is straightforward,
and to conceptual substructures (such as
may exist) behind these graphics. The
same goes for collateratlon and annotation •
of multidimensional cluster materials, e.g.
in sociology: the system would allow, for
Instance, the viewing, annotation and col-
lateration of sociometric clusterings.)

BOX FISSION. (The Beauty Part.)

For paired views of projections from
the same cluster which do not share a com¬
mon coordinate, a marvelous trick Is pos¬
sible: BOX FISSION. Starting with one box
containing a galaxy, we pull It apart .
making two boxes and two galaxies whose
Points are linked.

Now both boxes can be rotated Indepen¬
dently, and any view considered; equivaience-
linkages may now be viewed between any two
views. (The eye muat, however, turn two
corners.)

(It is interesting to note i_mat the links in
Box Fission are handled automatically, to an
extent, by the hardware.)

WELCOME TO THE FUTURE. HUH?

This has summarized the development of
some Ideas for the viewing and manipulation
of complex stuff. 1 offer this design. Inso¬
far as I have been able to present it h^e,
as an example of fantic design (see p. 5‘0 ) •
There iB.no logical necessity to it; it cor¬
responds to the traditional structure of no
technical system; it arises from no intrinsic
or traditional data structures used for com¬
puter representation of these things.

But none of these considerations is to
the point. This design has a certain stark
logical simplicity; it extends Itself plaus¬
ibly from its basic outlook (or starting
ideas, if you can Isolate them) into a tool
for truly intricate cross-consideration,
without adding unnecessary and hard-to- ^
remember "technicalities." At least that s
how I think of it.

Obviously the aesthetics of it are im¬
portant to the designer. But a more final
criterion of its goodness— its usefulness-
may depend on the seme parsimony snd organi¬
zational clarity.

XAHANT

2$*** ~.D oe )

KUBLA KHAN : OR. A VISION IN A DREAM.

A VHAdWKNT.
or tW, the Author, (hen It

d t.l n I oo. oo t?

iTih*'!. from ih _

•trl tllAl lie IU rMdiDK
m “ t*urchM»'ii
'■It palace lo be
■ mflu of fertile
i for About three

■« blmuthtore. with

companion in eiilch All (hr imitr> roer up

A parallel production of the rorrcepohdent erpreeelon*. without any
■enulkxi or conedoiienee* of effort On awaking he Appeared lo hlnuelr
here a dlMInct recollection of the «hole. And taking hit pen, Ink. And
paper, inataatlyend eagerly wrote down the line* that »re here pre-
•erred. At tliia moment he waa unfurtuoately called out by a pereon
on bueineee from Porlock, And detained by him alaore an hour, and oo
his return to tlie room, found, to bis no email lurprteeand mortification,
dial (hough He (till retained entne rague and dim recollection of the
general purport of the etaioo, yet. with the reception of wme eight or
ten ecalteml line* and images, all (he rest had panort sway Ilka the
image* on the turface of a etream into which a etooe had been call,
but alaa ' without the after reiteration of the latter :

Then all the charm
I* broken—all that phantom-world »o fair,
iiid a t hoi Hand drcleU ipread.

KUBLA KHAN.

Ix Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A a lately pleasure-dome decree :

Where Alpb, the tarred river, ran
Through caverns measureless toman
Down to a sunless sett.

So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round :

And there were gardens bright with sinuous rilla
Wlicrc blossomed many an incenw-benring tree :

And here were forests undent ns the hills,

Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh ! that deep romantic cliaai'u which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a erdarn cover I
A savage place ! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was Imunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover !

And from this chasm, witli ceaseless turmoil seething.
As If this earth lo fast thick p ants were breathing,

A mighty fountain momently was forced :

Amid whose swift half-in term it tied burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,

Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail :

And 'mid these dnneing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.

Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred fiver ran,

Then readied the caverns measureless to man,

And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean :

And mid tills tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war !

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated mid way on the waves ;

Where waa heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.

It was a miracle of rare device,

A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice 1
A oainsel with a dulcimer
In a vision ouce I saw :

It was an Abyssinian maid,

And on her dulcimer Bhe played,

Singing of Mount Abora.

Could 1 revive wit bin me
Her symphony and song.

To such a deep delight r twould win me
That with music loud and long,

I would build that dome in air,

That sunny dome ! those caves of ice !

And all who heard should see them there.

And all should cry. Beware ! Beware !

His flashing eyes, his floaliug hair I
Weave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread.

For be on bouey-dew hath fed.

And drunk the milk of Paradise.

"Is that the river that runs down to the sea?"

James Steuart
in

"The FBI Story."

Patent work on Xanadu is in progress.

Xanadu, friend, is dream.

The name comes from the poem (nearby);
Coleridge's little story of the artistic trance
(and the Person from Porlock) make it an appro¬
priate name for the Pleasure Dome of the crea¬
tive writer. The Citizen Kane connotations,
and any other connotations you may find in the
poem, are side benefits.

I have been working on Xanadu, under this
and other names, for fourteen years now.

Originally it was going to be a super sys¬
tem for handling text by computer (see p. \'X
and |-5 ). But it grew: as I realized, level

by level, how deep the problem was.

And the concept of what it was to be kept
changing, as I saw more and more clearly that
it had to be on a minicomputer for the home.

(You can have one in your office too, if you
want, but that's not what it's about.)

Now the idea is this:

To give you a screen in your home from
which you can see into the world's hypertext
libraries.

(The fact that the world doesn't have
any hypertext libraries-- yet-- is a minor
point.)

To give you a screen system that will
offer high-performance computer graphics and
’text services at a price anyone can afford.

To allow you to send and receive written mes¬
sages at the Engelbart level (see p .b\'\ L lfa) . To
allow you to explore diagrams (see p. 0MI7and
P. Dll-51 ) . To eliminate the absurd distinction
between "teacher" and "pupil."

To make you a part of a new electronic
literature and art, where you can get all your
questions answered and nobody will put you
down.

* * *

Originally Xanadu was programmed around
the Parallel Textface (see p. W153)• But as
the requirements of the Parallel Textface were
better and better understood, Xanadu became
a more general underlying system for all forms
of interactive graphic environments. Its data
structure has Virtual Blocklessness and is
thus well related to the smooth motions needed
by screen users. Thus in its final form, now
being debugged, it will support not only the
Parallel Textface (see p. )> the Walking Net

(see p.DHSI ), Stretchtext (see p.[)Ml9), Zoom
Maps (see p. DM 19) and so on, but indeed any
data structure that needs to combine complex
linkages with fast access and rapid changes.
Because the data structure is recursively
extensible, it will permit hypertext (see p. Drill)
of any depth and complexity, and the collateral
linkage (see p-bM*^) of an Y objects of contemp¬
lation.

Xanadu is under private development and
should be avail'able, if the economy holds, in
1976. Regrettably, first prices will not be at
the $3000 level necessary for the true Home
System. Exact equipment for the production ver¬
sion has not been selected. A number of micro¬
processors (see p. M H ) are i n serious conten¬
tion, notably the Lockheed SUE, but there’s
something to be said for a regular mini. The
PDP-11 is of interest (see p.^H2 ); (so espe¬

cially is its Cal Data lookalike-- unless DEC
would like to build us a PDP-11X with seven modes
of indirect display addressing. Are you reading
this, Ken Olsen?) And here's a laugh: a com¬
pany called IBM may in fact make a suitable com¬
puter, except that they call it the "3740 Work
Station." So for those customers who want IBM
equipment, maintenance and prices, with Xanadu
software, it's a definite possibility.

So, fans, that about wraps it up. I * 11 be
interested in hearing from people who want this
system; many hardheaded business people Tiave
told me nobody will. Prove 'em wrong, America!

Of course, if hyper-media aren't the great¬
est thing since the printing press, this whole
project falls flat on its face. But it is hard
for me to conceive that they will not be.

WHAT IT IS: rha haar* ol the Xanadu ays tee, no*
bain? debugged, con.l.t. of a highly lrtagr.tad
tor usa on elnlcrwputsra ("softwya’—
aaa p. 16) or Microprocessors CMra««ra'— aaa
p. 44 ) . It la an operating aystaa with two pro-
r ». a highly ganarallrad data aanagaawnt aya-
taa for handling aatraawly cca*.ld« data in huge
lilii, and a ganarallrad dlaplay ayataa, married
to tha Othar, for handling branching animation
and retrieval and cannad dlaplay prograna. These
ordain retrievals by tha data system. Tha Paral-
lal Tvaatfaoa (aaa p. IRCJ) and tha Walking Wat
(aaa p.^tTI I ara two audi cannad programs.

Thaaa internal systems ara lrt>ndad to ba add
with conaolaa of various typaa. aa llluatratad
nearby, for etand-alon# turnkey usa (aaa p. 13 ).
xanadu la asIf-networklog. two on tha phona make
a natwork, and more can join.

LANCUJKStSi Xanadu programs will not ba made avail¬
able In any higher language!, mainly bacauaa of thalr
proprietary character, but alao bacauaa tha dlaplay
routinae (and some of tha retrieval routlnaa) milt
ba programmed in machine language.

Tha ayatam haa lta own under-level language, XAP
(Xanadu kaeambly Program). While two higher-level
dlaplay languagaa, DIWOO (Dlaplay Lingo) and X ult
(tha ultimata?) ara conts^>leted, thaaa will not or¬
dinarily ba accaaaibla to tha uaar. Tha purpoaa of
Xanadu la to furuieh tha uaar with uneomputerlah
good-guy eyitM for a pacific purpoeee, not a chance
to do hie own programing.

lagnrtant faaturaa of tha data ayatam ara huge ed-
draaaebillty (In tha trllllona of elemental »nd Vir¬
tual Blocfcleeeneee. For advantagaa of thla latter,
aaa Zocm Nap, p. ONIV

COMPATIBILITYi bacauaa of lta highly empactad and
unconventional etructure, it la not ct^>atibla with
othar operating ayatam (including time-eharing).

Anyway, to put it on a larger machine la like hav¬
ing your Hilda driven around in a truck. Bacauaa
it uaaa a line-drawing dlaplay (aaa p. Mtl-J) and
therefore drava Individual arbitrary linaa on tha
acraan repeatedly, it is not compatible with tele-
vlaiom either— unleee you point a TV camera at it,
or tha equivalent. Sorry.

STAKDAKDIZATIOat. Taking a laaaon from tha integrated
work of varioua people whoee work haa bean deacrlbed
in this book, wa aaa that if you want a thing dona
right , you have to do It youreelf. (Great Idaaa of
Waatam Man: one of a ear lea.) My good friend Calvin
Nooara with hie TRAC Language (aaa pp. 18-21) haa dit-
coverad that trademark la one way to nail thla aa a
right.

Several lavele of standardization ara important with
Xanadu. One, all Xanadu systeau muat ba able to work
with all Xanadu filae (except for poaaible varlatlona
In acraan performance and alia of local memory). Now,
there ara thoee who would not be concerned for thla
eort of univeraallty, and who might even try to maka
aura ayatama ware incompatible, lo that you had to buy
accaaaorlaa and converaion kite up and down tha line.
That ia one of tha thlnge that must ba avoided) ’par¬
tial' ct^atihlllty. aubjact to expanaiva optiona and
condition*, a wall-known technique in tha field.

By atabiliring the ’Xanadu’ trademark, I hope to pre¬
vent auch abananigana. Thua every accredited Xanadu
ayatam will offer full compatibility with tha data
etructure. and either full performance or aubatitutea
aa neccsaitatad by tha hardware. The ’Xanadu’ trademark
can thua in principle be made available to amnufacturars
abiding by all dasign faaturaa of tha eyatem.

Second, all Xanadu ayatama ehould ba able to work with
outelde ayaterna either through or off tha net, l_f they
conform to tha unuaual data rulaa required by tha un¬
usual daaign of tha ayatam. Thla aaaures that Xanadu
ayatama will ba compatible with any othar popular net¬
works. It almo aasurea others who want to offer Xan-
adu-class services to system owners (through, e.g.,
conventional time-sharing) that If they adhere to the
rules (aaa ’Canons." p.»*l5t> they can play the game
on a certified basis.

AVAILABILITY. It i* hoped that Xanadu will ba avail¬
able in 1975 for at least one machine (guess which).

Aa a program it will ba available only in absolute
form, without source or comaenta.

AHEM. There is a lot to talk about, but a lot of time
can ba wasted talking. It is suggested that thought¬
ful computer firms, interested in some form of partici¬
pation, study this book carefully— at least enough so
no one’s time need ba wasted.

B1BLI0CRAFHY

’’Nelson's the lame, and Uhat Ha Proposes Could Outdo
Enjalbart." Electronics. . 2* Hov 69, 97.

A recant report by Arthur D. Little, a Boeton firm

that makes its money by seeming to be omniscient,
commented on the considerable market potential
for on-line data supply ayateaa. The report
coat 5*00 or 5*000, I forget which. Big-time in-

First of all, bear In mind that Xanadu is a
iMlfied ayatam tor complex data management and
dlaplay. Thla basically means that tha imi ay¬
atam (without tha displays) can eerva aa a (aader
machine for tha data network Itself,

call, and atorlng any materials they want saved.
Thla saves all kiwi, of haaala. with big computer,
and bli-eomputer-etyle programing.

But who will pay for it? To build tha kind
o capacity wa’r. talking about- all tboa. dl.ka,
all those minicomputer. In a natwork— won't it
taka lmanaa amount, of capital? Now, paopl. ask
me, will any Ammrlcao company aver back auch a
Utopian schema?

One method of financing haa proven Itself la
tha postwar suburban era, thla time of drlva-ine
and hamburger stands.

Waal from (Tie a nook balcony of a largo Xanadu installation,
overlooking tha Internal greenery. Hexagonal architecture
permits physical expansion uithout interruption of eervioes.
(The nollusks have been telling us something about expansion.)

Franchising.

Vhat I propose, then, la tha Mom-end Pop Xanadu
Shop. Or, more proparly, tha Xanadu stand . ”)tom and
Pop” are tha owners of tha individual stand. But tha
customara can ba famlllca, too.

Porta-Xan. (Hookup by Tom Barnard.)
Faceplate reflects CUT to user vhile
he's abroad in the u orld. One-hand
typewriting and pointing device frees
the other. Can be built idth avail¬
able ruggedised components.

MS Id. XMAH) $0AT«TE<iy.

THE AUTHOR ANSWERS THE QUESTIONS

HE IS MOST FREQUENTLY ASKED.

Q. If you publish your ideas like this, aren't
you afraid aomaone will steal them?

A. Ho.

(Tha Law of Intellectual Property ia about
the strongest backing the individual haa in
thla society.)

Besides which, there is hare no revelation of
the Xanadu Sneakrets.

Q. Won't some big company sweep your Xanadu
under if they imitate it?

A. Let 'cn. If they come up with a ayatam having
equivalent scope, which seems unlikely (see
Canons, p.>\Sf ), I might even feei I had
achieved enough. But In the meentlme, like
the tortoise, and like DEC, I aa going to
continue to try to do It right .

Q. Aren't you afraid that writing a flippant book
will keep people from taking you seriously?

A. 1 do not want to be taken seriously In soma
quarters until it's too late.

From far away the children aaa tha tall goidan
X'a, ”0h. Daddy, can’t we atop? 1 want to play
Spacewar, 1 ' aaya little Johnny. Big Sla adds, "You
know. I have to check something for my paper on
Roman politics.” And Horn aaya, "Say, that would be a
good place for lunch.”

So they turn In peat tha aim that says "OVER
2 BILLION SCREEN HOURS,” and pull into tha lot. They
park the car, and Dad shows the clerk his Xanadu cred¬
it card, and the kids run to acraaoa. Dad and Mom
wait for a big horizontal CRT, though, bacauaa there
ara soma memories they'd Ilka to share togathar...

Sis'a paper, of course, goes to her teacher
through hla Xanadu console.

THE PUN. IS IT AS CRAZY AS IT SIEMS?

Deep inside, tha public wants It, but people
who think of computers In cliche’s can't com?abend
it. This means "the public” muat somehow create It.

One way to go ia to start a new corporation,
raglatar it with tha SEC and try to tales a lot of
money by selling 4»ock publicly. Unfortunately
there are all klnda of obstacles for that. ("Rag
A" la about aa far aa it will go.)

Through the-mlraele of franchising, new, a lot
of the difficulties of conventional backing can ba
bypaesed. Tha franchisee has to put up tha monay
for the computers, the acopts, tha adorabla purple
enamel building, tha Johns and ao on; aa a Xanadu
franchisee he gets the whole turnkey system and
certain teaponslbilitis, in the OVERALL XANADU NET¬
WORK— of which he ia a member. He la assigned
permanent storage of certain classes of materials,
on call from elsewhere In the net. (Naturally,
everything la stored in more than one place).

The Xanadu subscriber, of course, gets what ha
requests at the acraan as quickly aa poeaibla— or
>n priority if he wants to pay for It— and may
itora hla own files, including linkages among other
•aterlala and marginal notation# to othar thing)
that can be called. (Sea collateral itructuraa,
p.DM5i; these can automatically bring forth any¬
thing they're linked to. (See "Nelson's Canons,”
p.jp???.)) A user's historical record will ba
stored to whatever degree he desires, but not (if
he chooses) in ways (hat can be Identified with
him.

Home uae^e need only dial a tocel phone nia-
ber— their neareat Xanedu stand— to connect with
the entire Xanadu natwork. (The coat of using
something stored on the network has nothing to do
with where It la stored.)

(Special high-capacity Unas need not ba in¬
stalled between storage stations, as appropriate
digital transmission services ara becoming avail¬
able co«erc tally.)

i Vayi* 4) (wvj »*-eA m* ,

V”»»l (no !•<*!

I have beard rumors that someone else in the field
calls a computer product "Xanadu.”

1 tend to doubt this; and even if they did, my
usage goes back to 1966.

Various security techniques*prevent others
from reading a subscriber*, files, even If they
algn on faleely; the Dartmouth technique of
scrambling on non-etored keywords la a good ona.

5<0

\a,.Xv UeW -wcL-w

/ uould like to thank (in ohronological order)
Elliot Klugman, Hat CKubla m ) Kuhn, Clenn
Babeoki, Cal Danisle and John V.E. Ridguay
for the considerable time and involvement
they gave to the Xanadu program design sessions;
thanks also to various others vho eat in from
time to time. For the final selection of
algorithms, houevsr, no one it to blame but me.

I am grateful to the good offices of Suarthmore
College for the use of their equipment in the
continuing efforts to debug the Xanadu programs.

The Xanadu stand alao haa private rooms wlcb
multiple acraena, which can be ranted for parties,
bualneaa meet Inga, design sessions, brieflags,
legal consultations, lacturaa, ecsncaa, aaislcslaa.

The choice locations for tha Xanadu stands
ara somewhat different from hMburgcr spots. But
that's probably not anything to go into here.

Within the Xanedu network, then, people say
read, write, send maeeegas, study end.play.

tyei KfcJCLM/-
K"u Me me /rf

Thanks a lot, Sam Coleridge,
for tKose two symbols.

Xanadu.

And the Albatross.

“Liilcii," Mr. Wonka utd, "I’m an old man. Tin modi
older than yon think. I can'l go on forever. I’ve got no
children of my own. no family at all. So who is going to
run the factory when I get too old to do it tnytcll? Suiiir.mr'j
got to keep it going—if only ft>r the ukr of the Oompa-
Loompai. Mind you. there are ihouundi of clever men who
would give anything for the rhincc to conic in and lake
over from me. bui I don't uvin that son of person. 1 don't
want a grown-up person at all. A grownup won’t lisicn
to me; lie won't learn. He will try to do things his own way
and not mine. So I have to have a child. I want a good
sensible hiving child, one to whom I can tell all my most
precious randy-making secrets - while I am still alive.”

Roald Dahl, CherU. and the Chocolate Factory,
p.157.

I am sorry I have not been able
to reply to all those who have written
lo me saying they wish they could
work for The Nelson Organisation
al even a low salary.

So do 1, my friends, so do 1.

How are we going to sell the Home Computer?

Well if you want to sell computers, let me tell you what to do:
You've got to talk to the housewives, and the children, too;

No one wants to program, they want something they can view...

It’s got to offer fun, and it!s got to offor truth;

It's got to give you something that’ll lift you from the booth;
It's got to be uplifting to the Lady from Duluth.

You've got to have a vision; you've got to have an angle;

You should maybe sing a jingle (in a way that doesn't jangle);
It's got to have a tingle, in a way their minds can't tangle--

So continuing under our guidance inertial,

Let's have the JltffrHJG’ fA(L.

H *""‘0

|U. IwVt]

[KKU-uJ

XAN-A-DU, 00--

THK-- NORLD-- 0F-- Youuuv/

Is Xanadu worth waiting for7
That depends, doesn't it,

on the velum of thm hand-bush
differential bird utility ratio.

CftZY if/CA ffX

U4a?

what mm

IS R&tUY SAYING-

e~i

u'sjtrjt* 4 ' / 't~

nnJT,pief * Ph-J)’

Fro* "Barnua-Tronic®"

(citation p. DM 2.)

11 Knowing, undmtandini *™l

freedom can all be advanced by the
promotion and deployment of com¬
puter display console* (with the
right program* behind them).

Computer prenenlatlonnl media,
coming soon, will not be technically
determined but rather will be new
realm* for human artistry This point
of view radically affect* how we
design man machine aystem* of any
kind, especially those for inform*
tion retrieval, teaching, and general
writing and reading Some practi¬
tioner. see such system* a* narrowly
technical, with the computer hoisting
up little pieces ol writing on some
"scientific" basis ond showing them
to you one grunt at a lime, A Metre-
cal banquet I disagree. The system.
should be opulent.

3) The problem in presentational
systems of any kind is to make
things look good- <**l tight.and come
across clearly. The things that mat¬
ter are the fee! of the system, the
iMer's state of mind, his possible con¬
fusion. boredom or enthusiasm, the
problems ol communicating concept*,
and the very nature of concept* and
their interconnection There will
never be a "science” of presentation,
except as it relates to these things

4) Not the nature of machines,
but the nature of ideal, is what
matters. It is incredibly hard to de¬
velop. organise and transmit ideas,
and it always will be But at least
in the future we won't be booby-
trapped by the nature of paper We
can design magic paper.

It is time to start using computers
to bold information for the mind
much os books have held this infor¬
mation in the past. Now information
lor the mind is very different from
"information for the computer'’ as
we have thought of it, hacked up
and compressed into blocks Instead
we can stretch the computer

I am proposing a curious kind of
subversion. "Let us design,” I soy,
and when people «cc the systems,
everybody will want one All I want
to do is put Renaissance humanism
in a multidimensional responsive con¬
sole. And I am trying to work out
the forms of writing of the future.
Hypertexts.

Hypertexts: new forms of writing,
appearing on computer screens, that
will branch or perform at the reader’s
command A hypertext is a non¬
sequential piece of writing; only the
computer display makes it practical
Somewhere between a book, a TV
show and a penny arcade, the hyper¬
text can lie n vast tapestry of infor¬
mation. all in plain English i spiced
with a few magic trick* on the
serren I, which the reader may attack
and play for the things he wanl*.
branching and jumping on the screen,
using simple controls as if he wen-
driving (i car. There can be special¬
ized subpart, for specialized in¬
terest*. instant availability of rele¬
vancies in all directions, footnotes
that are books themselves. Hyper¬
texts will be so much better than
ordinary writing that the printed
word will wither away. Heal writing
by people, make no mistake, not
data banks, robot summaries or other
clank A person is writing to other
people, just as before, but on magical
paper he can cut up and tie in knots
and fly around on.

I believe in calling a spade a spade
-- not a personalized earth-moving equip¬
ment module; and a multi-dimensional spade
by gum, a hyperspade-- not a personalized
earth-moving equipment module with augmen¬
ted dirt access, retrieval and display cap
ability under individulaized control.

I want a world where we can rend the world’s literature from screens rather
than personally searching out the physical books. A world without routine paper¬
work, because all copying operations take place automatically and formalized tran¬
sactions occur through formalized ceremonies at consoles. A world when* v.-o can
learn, study, create, and sha re our creations without having privately to schlepp and
physically safeguard them. There is a familiar, all-embracing motto, the jingle we
alt know from the day school lets out, which I take quite seriously: "No more pencils;
do more books, no more teachers’ dirty looks " The Fantic Age.

r ron "Coaputopia and Cybercrud."

(Citation nearby.)

WfEsro

My work is concerned principally with the
theory and execution of systems useful to the mind
and the creative imagination. This has polemical
end practical aspects: I claim that the precepts of
designing systems that touch people's minds, or
contents to be shown in them, are simple and uni¬
versal: making things look good, feel right and
come across clearly. I claim that to design systems
that involve both machines and people's minds is
art first, technology second, and in no way a deri¬
vative specialty off in some branch or computer
science.

However, presentational systems will cer¬
tainly involve computers from now on.

Since hundreds of such systems are now
being built, many of them all wrong, we must
teach designers (and certain others) the basics
of computers, and give them some good examples
to emulate (such as Sutherland's Sketchpad,
Bilzer's PLATO, and, I hope, some of my own
designs).

Further, the popular superstitions about
computers must be fought - the myths that they
are mechanistic, scientific, objective or indepen¬
dent of human intent and contemplative involve¬
ment.

Nqson's Onoi|*

It is essential to state these firmly snd
publicly, because you are going to see a lot
of systems in the near future that purport to
be the last-word cat's-pajama systems to bring
you "all the information you need. anytime,
anywhere.” Unless you have thought about it
you may be snowed by systems which sre in¬
herently and deeply limiting. Here are some
of the things which I think we will all went.

(The salesman for the other system will say
they are impossible, or "We don't know how
to do that yet,” the standard puldown. But
these things arc possible, if we design them
In from the bottom up; and there are many
different valid approaches which could bring
these things into being.)

These arc rules, derived from common
sense ond uncommon concern, about what people
can and should hove in general screen systems,
systems to read from.

1. EASY AND ARBITRARY FRONT E>JDS.

The "front end" of a system-- that is,
the program that creates the presentations for
the user and interocts with him-- must be clear
and simple for people to use and understand.

THE TEN-MINUTE RULE. Any system
which cannot be well taught to a layman in
ten minutes , by a tutor in the presence of a
responding setup, is too complicated. This may
sound far too stringent; I think not. Rich and
powerful systems may be given front ends which
are nonetheless ridiculously clear: this is a
design problem of the foremost importance.

TEXT MUST MOVE, that is. slide on the
screen when the user steps forward or backward
within the text he is reading. The alternative,
to clear the screen and lay out a new presenta¬
tion, is baffling to the eye and thoroughly dis¬
orienting, even with practice.

Many computer people do not yet under¬
stand the necessity of this. The problem is that
if the screen is cleared, and something new
then appears on it, there is no visual way to
tell where the new thing came from: sequence
and structure become baffling. Having it slide
on the screen allows you to understand where
you've been and where you're going; a feeling
you also get from turning pages of a book.

(Some close substitutes may be possible on
some types of screen.)

On front ends supplied for normal users,
there must be no explicit computer languages
requiring input control strings. no visible eso¬
teric symbols. Graphical control structures
having clarity and safety, or very clear task-
oriented keyboards, are among the prime alter¬
natives.

All operations must be fail-safe.

Arbitrary front ends must be attachable:
since we are talking about reading from text,
or text-and-picture complexes, stored on a
large data system, the presentational front end
must be separable from the data services pro¬
vided further down in the system, so the user
may attach his own front-end system, having
his own style of operation and his own private
conveniences for roving, editing and other forms
of work or play at the screen.

2. SMOOTH AND RAPID DATA ACCESS.

The system must be built to make possible
fast and arbitrary access to a potentially huge
data base, allowing extremely large files (at
least into the billions of characters). However,
the system should be contrived to ollow you to
read forward, back or across links without sub¬
stantial hesitation. Such access must be impli¬
cit, not requiring knowledge of where things are
physically stored or what the internal file names
may.happen to be. File divisions must be in¬
visible to the user in all his roving operations
(FREEDOM OF ROVING): boundaries must be
invisible in the final presentations, and the user
must not need to know about them.

3. RICH DATA FACILITIES.

Arbitrary linkages must be possible be¬
tween portions of text, or text and pictures;
annotation of anything must be provided for;
collateration (see p. "go ) should be a standard
facility, between any pair of well-defined ob¬
jects^ PLACEMARK facilities must be allowed
to drop anchor at, or in, anything. These
features imply private annotations to publicly-
□ccessible materials as a standard automatic
service mode.

The AI people don't understand,

the IR people don't understand,

the CAI people don't understand,

and for God's sake don't tell IBM.

I believe that an introduction to any
subject can be humorous, occasionally pro¬
found, exciting, vivid, and appealing even
to experts on their-separate levels.

Perhaps someday I can prove it.

*-^

4. RICH DATA SERVICES BASED ON

THESE STRUCTURES,

The user must be allowed multiple rover*
(movable placemarks at points of current activity);
making possible, especislly, multiple windows
(to the location of each rover) with displays or
collateral links.

The system should also have provision
for high-level mooting ( y and the auto¬

matic keeping of historical trails.

Then, a complex of certain very necessary
and very powerful facilities based on these things,
viz.:

A. ANTHOLOGICAL FREEDOM: the user must
be able to combine easily anything he finds into

an "anthology," a rovable collection of these
materials having the structure he wants. The
linkage information for such anthologies must be
separately transportable and passable between
users.

B. STEP-OUT WINDOWING; from a place
in such an anthology, the user must be able

to step out of the anthology and into the previous
context of the material. For instance, if he has
just read a quotation, he should be able to have
the present anthologies! context dissolve around
the quotation (while it stays on the screen), and
the original context reappear around it. The
need of this in scholarship should be obvious.

C. D1SANTHOLOGICAL FREEDOM: the
user must be able to step out of an apthology
in such a way and not return if he chooses.

(This has important implications for what must
really be happening in the file Structure.)

Earlier versions of public documents must
be retained, as users will have linked to them.

However, where possible, linkages must
also be able to survive revisions of one or both
objects.

5. "FREEDOM FROM

SPYING AND SABOTAGE."

The assumption must be made at the
outset of a wicked and malevolent governmental
authority. If such a situation does not develop,
well and good; if it does, the system will have
a few minimal safeguards built in.

FREEDOM FROM BEING MONITORED. The
use of pseudonyms and dummy accounts by indi¬
viduals, as well as the omission of certain record¬
keeping by the system program, aFe necessary
here. File retention under dummy accounts is
also required.

Because of the danger of file sabotage, and
the private at-home retention by individuals of
fileB that also exist on public systems, it is
necessary to have FIDUCIAL SYSTEMS FOR TELLING
WHICH VERSION IS AUTHENTIC. The doctoring
of on-line documents, the rewriting of history--
cf. both Winston Smith's continuous revision of
the encyclopedia in Nineteen Eighty-Four and
H.L. Hunt's forging of historical telegrams for
"The White House"-- is a constant danger. Thus
our systems must have a number of complex
provisions for verification of falsification, espe¬
cially the creation of multilevel fiducials (parity
systems), and their storage in a variety of
places. These fiducials must be locslizable and
separate to small parts of files.

7. COPYRIGHT.

Copyright must of course be retained, but
a universal flexible rule has to be worked out.
permitting material to be transmitted and copied
under specific circumstances for the payment of
a royalty fee, surcharged on top of your other
expenses in using the system.

For any Individual section of material,
such royalty should have a maximum: i.e., "by
now you’ve bought it."

Varying royalty rates, however, should
be the arbitrary choice of the copyright holder;
except that royalties should not vary sharply
locally within a tissue of material. On public
screens, moving between areas of different roy¬
alty cost must be sharply marked.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Theodor H. Holaon, "Coaputopia and Cybercrud."
in Roger Levien (ed.), Coaputers
In Ins t ruction (Rand Corporation, 1971).
Theodor H. Nelaon, "A Conceptual Friatvork

for Man-Machine Everything." Proc. MCC 73.

%scd) Mf

v-wo)

drram, part the »lt el man ta »ar what dream
It *-«•: man n but an am, 1/ he fin about to n-
pound thi. dream. Mill, outfit 1 waa—there li
no man can tell wlial. Mrtlio«(|ht I wat,—and
■rlfcoufht I had.— but man it bo* a patrhed
fool, if he will oiler l" ear what nvrthontfit I bid.

The eee of man bath not heard, the ear of man
ball) not tern. man 4 , bind I. not able to tatlc.
hit Ih|th' !•> loixeiir, nor h.. brart to report,
what air dream »a»,

Bottom the Ueaver

Now you see why I brought you here.

This Gem-maniacal book has. obviously, been
created as b crossroad of several cross pur¬
poses: to furnish a needed, grabby layman's
introduction to two vast but rather inaccessible
realms: to present a coherent, if contentious,
point of view, and unroll a particular sort of
apocalyptic vision after preparing the vocabulary
for it: to make bright friends and informed sup¬
porters for my outlook and projects; to gel home
to some of my friends the fact that what 1 am
doing is at bottom not technical: and finally, if
nothing else, to set forth some principles about
the way things should be. which others will
have-to answer if they propose to do less.

Thus, overall, this book is a message in a Klein
bottle, wailing to see who's thirsty.

1 suppose it all started in collcgj. Sworth-
more left me with an exaggerated notion of the
extent to which ideas are valued in the academic
world; it took two graduate schools to clear this
up. After that, as far ns I was concerned,

Ph.D. stood for Poophead. But I still cared
about ideas, and the deep necessity of finding
their true structure and organization. From
writing I knew the grueling difficulty of trying
to make ideas get in order. I believed in the
pure, white light of inspiration and the power of
the naive but clever mind to figure out anything,
if not obstructed but dumb dogmas and obtuse
mental schemata fostered by the educational system.

When I finally got the idea of what compu¬
ters were about, sometime in 1960, I took endless
walks at night trying to hash these things out and
see where they led. The text systems came clear
to me, at least in their beginnings; in a few weeks;
the realization that 3D halftone was possible came
to me as a shock the following spring, I believe
as 1 was walking across Radeliffe Common. Since
then trying to build these systems for creation and
the true ordering of intricate thought has been my
driving dream.

My own life among these dream machines
has been a nightmare, thoroughly unpleasant,
and if people are right in telling me that nobody
wants systems like the ones I am designing,

I'll get the heck oul of this and be a disk jockey
or a toy salesman or something.

I first got into this as a writer; all I
wanted was a decent writing system that would
run on a computer. Little did 1 realize the im¬
mensity of what that entailed, or that for some
reason my work and approach would engender
indignation and anger wherever I went. There
is a fiction that everybody in these Helds is
doing something fundamentally scientific and
technical, and this Hction is usually upheld in
carefully enacted mutual playlets. Trying to
cut through that and say, "Let’s build a home for
mankind that will at last be shaped to fit man's
mind." does not seem to-generate immediate
warmth and welcome.

But I'm glad for the friends I've made in
this field, and of course there have been a lot
of laughs. (I’d really have hated to miss being
in this field, just for the thrilling madness of
it all.) All in all my adventures have been a
sort of participatory journalism, which I'd like
to write up properly some time. Some highlights;

The days of madness in '68, trying to
start an honest corporation to do all this stuff,
and suffering endless lunches with Wall Street
hangers-on who were looking for a vehicle to
take public. They wanted another chicken-
franchise type company, though, and certainly
not ideas.

Being briefed by four different corporations,
most of them major, on the fantastic powers their
interactive-movie system was going to have. One
of these briefings was in the board room of a
famous skyscraper. And now, only one of those
systems is left-- Kodak's.

Then there was the courtly gentleman who
was going to be my Noah Dietrich, my Colonel
Parker. He assured me that through his business
connections ell was going to go marvelously,
and then later intimated that as a special favor
he was going to put me in touch with other
universes and the flying saucer people. I just
didn't have time for other universes.

Then there was the suppression of my first
book (this is my second). You might say It waa
a misunderstanding, at least on my part. My
boss's understanding was evidently that the ad¬
vancement of my ideas would be detrimental to
his. If it had been a question of free speech in
Yugoslavia it might have been different. Well,
it takes a long time to get a book together, but
here we go again.

Then there was the lime I was called in
as a consultant on a vast federal system, never
mind whot. Numerous computer programs were
to be coordinated by a hypertext system they
had crested and they wanted to know if they'd
designed il right. It took months to find out
from the programmers exactly what the system
was , so I ended up writing the manual; after
which I explained what was wrong with the pro¬
ject and the whole hypertext system was scrapped.
And my job with it. I never quite got the swing
of consulting.

Flying coast-to-coast with the president
of a large corporation, he and I planned the
whole Xanadu budget for the following year at
something like half a million dollars, Two years
later, reduced In circumstances and driving a
yellow cab in New York, the miserable vehicle
breaks down in front of those same corporate
headquarters. And the reason I had that bad
taxi was that I was out of favor with the taxi
dispatcher, on account of having been absent
the previous week-- I had had to fly to California
to give a banquet address at the Rand Corporation.

Then there were my adventures with the

CIA.

I was sitting in my office at Vassar,
sagely advising a student, when the phone rang
und the caller identified himself as John W.

Kuipers, head of computer research at the CIA.

He told me I had been noticed as a new bright
young man in the field, and would 1 like lo
work for them?

Now. there is something about being a
cynic and a romantic. (They go together; the
cynic deflates ideas, the romantic falls in love
with them.) It is not impossible for the cynical
romantic to surmise that because everything he
has seen personally turned out to be so lousy,
that the true hope may lie at the heart of the
vortex, just where everybody thinks is impossible.
Also the Kennedy aftermath, when sophisticated
people had learned to laugh at simple idealism
as a facade for the real wheel-and-dealing,
slap-and-tickle. may have had something to do
with it; anyway, I was enchanted. Thus began
the Kuipers Caper.

YES, THERE IS A McLEAN, VIRGINIA

I was given a handler named Bob, a jolly
fellow, who kept assuring me that much money
was just around the corner. 1 was regaled with
success stories of other people in the computer
field who really, undercover Worked for Them.
(They weren’t doing anything very exciting,)

1 got to show my slides in the CIA office building
in Arlington, and to see there very fancy display
equipment behind shielded (!) double-doors in
a shielded (!!) computer room— shielded to keep
any planted bugs from transmitting out the con¬
tents of the computers' working registers. 1 even
got to visit the main CIA "campus" in McLean,
Virginia, where the sign says Agricultural
Research Station. It is an incredible feeling to
walk across that big eagle in the terrazzo,
and to be given the visitor's badge that says
"United States Government" all in wiggly lines.

They told me that they would be glad to
set me up in business as a hypertext company,
but 1 would have to have a corporation, because
that was the way they always did things. And so
it came to pass that The Nelson Organization, Inc.
was founded at the express request of the United
States Central Intelligence Agency. I wouldn't have
had it any other way. If life can't be pleasant it
can at least be surrealistic.

. . . BUT NO SANTA CLAUS

I was encouraged to write proposals for them,
and write proposals I did. (I happened to finish
typing the first one dufing a lightning storm,
and lightning crashed just as I was signing the
page; 1 felt like Faust.) I explained how hyper¬
text might have prevented the Bay of Pigs. After
due consideration, I did not say what hypertexts
might have done for the Warren Report. Numerous
jolly phone calls assured me that my first $25,000
was just around the corper.

The break came when Bob called me and
asked me to rewrite a proposal one more time.

He had circulated it, he said, among various
people "at the shop," who he reminded me were
holders of advanced degrees, and it had been
remarked that they found my proposal meaning¬
less: "Every place you say 'hypertext' you
could just as well put ’gobbledygook' instead;
you'll have to clear that up a little."

That did It. They couldn't read either.

Who turns out to be in charge of computer stuff
in the heart of the CIA, the inner sanctum, the
neat of vipers, but the same old poopy Ph.Ds.

I decided to resuscitate my virtue.

As far aa 1 know. there ia still not a
Decent Writing System anywhere in the world,
although several things now come close. It
seems a shame that grown men and women have
to rustle around in piles of paper, like squirrels
looking for acorns, in search of the phrases
and ideas they themselves have generated.

The decent writing system, as I see it, will
actually be much more: it will help us create
better things in a fraction of the time. but also
keep track of everything in better and more
subtle ways than we ever could before.

But nobody sees this— I suppose It's only
writers and editors that know they're trying to
"keep track of ideas"-- and I have been unable
to get this across to anyb ody. (The professional
writers, of course, won’t talk to me either.)

So here I am after fourteen years with
exactly two systems to show for it: the main one,
Xanadu, the text-and-animated-picture network
system, and Fantasm (J shouldn't have spent
the time but it was a labor of love), the simu¬
lated-photography system. Actually, I don't
have either of them to show, it’s all just flow¬
charts, but it turns out that if I work on either
of them with university equipment, my work of
fourteen years gets confiscated. So much for
that; the outside expedients for debugging con¬
tinue.

And, to lighten the burden, I've finally
given up on trying to reach professionals, who
evidently need a thick gravy of technicalism to
make the obvious palatable; with this bookity
I am taking my case to The People. It is there,
anyway, out in Consumerdom, that the real ac¬
tion is going to occur. So the important thing
is for everybody to know what’s really possible,
and what they could have. That is why 1 have
shot off my big canons (and this epistol).

To me, you see. this is really a holy
crusade, whereas I know guys to whom it's
just a living. It's no less than a question
of freedom in our time. The cases of Solzhenitsyn
and Ellsberg remind us that freedom is still
not what it should be. anywhere. Computer
display and storage can bring us a whole new
literature, the uniting and the apotheosis of the
old and the new; but there are many who would
not necessarily want to see this come about.

Deep and widespread computer systems would be
tempting to two dangerous parties, "organized ,
crime" and the Executive branch of the Federal
government (assuming there is still a difference
between the two). If we are to have the freedoms
of information we deserve as a free people, the
safeguards have to be built in at the bottom , now .
And the opulence which is possible must be made
clear to everyone before we settle on an inferior
system— as we did with television.

Some people have called my ideas and
systems "Orwellian." This is annoying in two
ways. In the first place it suggests the night¬
mare of Orwell's book Nineteen Eighty-Four ,
which obviously I want no part of. (But hey,
do you remember what that world of 1964 was
actually like? The cryptic wars against unseen
enemies that kept shifting? The government
spying? The use of language to twist and
manipulate? To paraphrase Huey Long; "Of
course we'll have 1984 in America. Only we’ll
call it 1972.")

The second reason the term "Orwellian"
is offensive is that it somehow reduces the life
of Orwell, the man, to the world of "1984."

This is a shallow and shabby thing to do to a
man who spent his life unmasking oppressiveness
in human institutions everywhere.

In the larger sense, then-- in homage to
that simple, honest, angry man, who cared about
nothing more than human freedom-- I would be
proud indeed if my systems could be called
Orwellian.

That reminds me. Nowhere in the book
have I defined the phrase "computer lib." By
Computer Lib I mean simply: making people
freer through computers. ThBt’s all.

Fantically— or fanatically —

Yours for a better world.

Before we have to settle for Any--

0 /

THE HOlf gAK\H CATA©G-

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happens in Liila office

years will proba-

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I_tie I.irons It; (i mw l h A Hi * port fju IT Hi
CU H OF HOME'S l’ro)i cl on the 1>rerllea
meiit of Mankind Universe Kooks, pnper.

12 71 ,

‘ FOLKS In'N T NEEL) I HESE 1.1 1. SHMOOS'

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DOT PLENTY O' EVERYTHIN!'*

FU’ EVKYHODY 1 ’ "

. upii, I h if Life and T inms of 1 h* Sfirmtu
PockeTTftmks. 1949. PP 1JI 172 >

One of the world'* most exclusive clubs
Is si so one of Its most dlsmsl. It I* The Club
of Rome, founded by Itslisn businessmen Aurelio
pec cel. having (a* of 1972) some seventy mem¬
bers from twenty-five countries.

Their concern they cell The Predicament
of Mankind, or the "problematique." It is the
problem of growth, pollution, population, and
What's Happening In general.

On funds from Volkswagen, they have
sponsored studies which thinking men can only
regard as the most dismal in portent of anything
we’ve seen in years. Or ever.

Basically the prediction la that mankind
has perhaps forty or fifty years left.

Not because of war, or bombs, or dirty
movies, or Divine retribution, but far simple
economic reason*. However, the studies are
often called "computer studies." because compu¬
ters are the viewing mechanism by which we
have come to see these coming events.

MALTHUS AGAIN

In the nineteenth century, a pessimistic
economist named Thomas Maithus predicted that
there would always be starving people, because
people increased g eometrically - - expanding at
compound interest, with a fixed rate of increase
creating an ever-steeper growth-- while agricul¬
tural production, which muat feed ua all, expanda
arithmetically, not as a rate but a few acres or
improvements at a time.

This meant. Malthua thought, that there
would always be the starving poor. For various
reasons this did not happen in Europe. But the
regrettable soundness of the general principle
persists: when rates of food production can’t
nearly keep up with rates of population growth,
people are going to atarve.

This is basically the prediction.

DYNAMIC MODELLING

Basically what has happened is this. One
Jay Forrester, of MIT, haa for some years been
studying "dynamic models" of things, a new
breed of simulation which couldn't have been
done without computers. And now dynamic
models of the world's entire economic system
can be created and tried out.

Basically dynamic models are mathematical
complexes where things change at rales that
change themselves over time. For instance, the
more you eat. the fetter you get, and the fatter
you gel. Ihe hungrier you are going lo be. Now ,
just because this is simple to say in words, and
aounds as though mathematicians would have had
solved the whole class of problems centuries ago.
that's not how it is. The intricacy of such
models, even for just a few variables, made it
impossible to foresee what happens in auch com
plexea exact by techniques of computer enactment.
Forrester, who has studied auch systems since
the fifties, has become aiert to their problems
and surprises. The culmination of his work has
been a model of the entire world's economic
growth, agriculture, population. Industrialization
and pollution; this Is described ir> his book
World Dynamics (Wright-Allen. 1971).

The insidious portents of Forres¬
ter's worji did not go unnoticed. The
dangers of population increasing at com¬
pound interest on a planet of unchanging
size, and further derivatives of these
changes, suggested that things might be
getting worse than anybody thought. An
alert Italian businessman brought togeth¬
er a group of scholars from all over the
world to study these problems, and called
the group The Club of Rome. Their first
work is out now, and it is very scary
and all too real. The book is called The
Limits to Growth . -

Basically what they have done is a
very elaborate computer simulation,
modelling the entire economy of the planet
in the years to come as a structure of
rates. They have taken into account
population, food-growing capacity, indus¬
trial growth, pollution, and a lot of
other things. The model is precise and
elaborate.

Unfortunately the findings are pre¬
cise and simple.

They tried all kinds of alternative
futures using the model-- what would
happen if the birth rates were different?
*hai if there were no pollution? What
if resources were infinite?

The results of the simulations are
always the same.

According to all the simulations,
the human race will be wiped out-- mostly
or completely-- by the year 2100.

Let's go briefly through the model.
Note that it can't be exact, and we can't
know what years things are going to hap¬
pen. The curves themselves-- the shape
of things to come-- tell the story all
too clearly. (For those who would like
a little more drama with their numbers,
finding these matters too abstract, I
strongly recommend the very beautiful
Indian film "Distant Thunder," a sort of
"Mr. Smith Starves to Death." Or just
stick around awhile.)

HUH?

The model assumes that birth rates
stay relatively constant in particular
parts of the world, and that new land
and agricultural techniques increase food
production in relatively well-understood
ways.

Now for the good news. Food pro¬
duction also tends to increase:

Now for the bad news. The running
ratio of food to people, Food per Capita,
takes a sudden nose-dive. And then so
does population.

It is not any individual prediction that is
frightening, since ihe numbers plugged into the
separate runs are merely hypotheses, lo show
the shape of the consequences. It Is the overall
set of runs that ia so ghastly , because they al¬
ways come out the same.

PAY CLOSE ATTENTION

Now, it is important to clarify what is
happening here and what is not. What is not
happening: an oracular pronouncement by "the
computer,” showing some transcendental predic¬
tion by a superhuman intelligence. What is hap¬
pening; people are trying out separate possible
assumptions lo see what their consequences are,
enacted by the computer according to the economic
rules they set up. Result: always the same.

Any aet of rules, played out in the unstable
exploding-population world beyond the seventies,
appears lo have similarly dire results.

WHAT HOPE IS THERE?

The original model is only an approxima¬
tion. and the basic results, as published in The
Li mits to Growth (sec box) reflect those approx¬
imations. One of the things that can be done is
lo fill in and expand the model more, to see
whether any hopes can be found in the details
and fine cracks which don’t appear from the
gross results. And, of course, to study and
re-study the basic findings. (For instance, a
small error was recently found: a decimal point
was misplaced in the "pollution” calculation,
leading tc an overstatement of the pollution in
some of the runs. (Bui pollution, remember, is
only part of the problem.)

So there you arc. This is a study of the
greatest importance. We may. just may. be get¬
ting wind of things In time lo change the outcome.
(If only we knew how. But again, this study
is where serious discussion must begin.)

I-1

IBM IS BULLISH ON THE FUTURE

Lewi* M. Branscomb, who haa tha awe-
soma title of Chief Scientist of IBM. has been
giving numerous talks recently that seam to be
directed against paaslmlsm resulting from the
Club of Rome studies.

"'On th* shoulders of the Information
processing community rests the responsi¬
bility for convincing the public that we
have the toole, if it ha* th* will, to ad-
dr*** th* complex *yatema management
problems of the future.’ Branscomb **ld.

"'More than any other profession
our community can restore the public's
confidence that from tha limited resource*
of tha world can be fashioned a Ufa of
wall managed abundance fur ail.' he
concluded ."

(Keynote speech. ACM 73. quoted

in Computerworld . 3 Sep 7], p. 4.)

Now begins the winter of the world.

We are poisoning everything.

With so little time left, we are of course
expanding and accelerating every form of pollution
and destruction.

We ere killing the last of our beautiful
brothers, the whales. Just to provide marginal
amortization of the whale-ships that are going
to be acrapped anyway.

Item: supposedly the Sahara Desert was
man-made . It is growing fast.

Set down upon this beautiful planet, a
garden spot of the universe, we are turning It
into a poisoned pigsty .

You and I may starve to death, deer reader.
In some year fairly soon now, around the turn of
the century, there will no longer be nearly e-
nough food for the teeming billions.

That, anyway, is what the predictions say.
The predictions are compelling, not becauae a
computer made them -- anybody can make a com¬
puter predict anything - but because the prem¬
ises from which the predictions grow were
very well thought out.

It is now up to us to make the predictions
come out wrong.

Not by killing the bearer of bed tidings,
or by pretending they were not clearly stated -
but by seeing what possible alternatives remain
in the few momenta of real choice we may yet
have-- scant years at beat.

To haggle now about ideology ia like ar¬
guing about who is driving while we are headed
toward a brick wall with the gas pedal jammed
to the floor.

The public thinks, "science will save us,"
a view at which many scientists snicker bitterly.
Perhaps wc will be shrunk to an inch's height,
or fed on rocks, or given gills and super-kidneys
to live in the ever-me re-poisoned sea. Or per¬
haps wc will do what science says others have
done: die out.

This science-will-ssve-us ostrich-position
is nicely exemplified by Albert Rosenfeld, Science
Editor of Saturda y Rev lew / Wor ld ■

Since "science” has given us the Boeing
747 and the neutrino, neither of which could
once, he thinks, have been imagined possible,
obviously (to him) science can do anything else
we think is impossible! He fully imagines that
science will come up with something to lake
care of geometrically increasing numbers of
people. In perpetuity?

"Take a lesson from the neutrino," he
says. "Wc can solve our problems." ("Look
to the Neutrino. Thou Doomsayer," Saturday
Review / Worl d. Feb 23 1974. 47.)

OTHER FUN

The growing diffusion or weapons and
grudges, and Ihe great vulnerability of almost
everything, assure that terrorism and political
extortion will will increase dramatically for
the foreseeable future. On the other hand,
whole economic blocs and industries have
lately mastered and demonstrated by example
how to hold the country at bay in order to
get tjeir wishes; as everybody can see what's
happening, and learn from it. the number of
wrenching unpleasantnesses created by terrorists
and industries and interest blocs will ircri-ost .

All these wore essentially forescon by
Thomas C. Schelling In his masterly 1960 work.
The Strategy of C onflict , Schelling formalizes
a theory of intimidation as pari of his study of
communicating adversaries. (His Is a st ructur al
rather thun a psychological study, examining
the properties of situations whether or not they
arc psychologically perceived. Regrettably,
perception of situations is improving all the

Cousteau says Ihe ocean* are dying
a lot faster than he anticipated
-- and give* mankind fifty year*
after life enda there.

But even if everything else were all righl.
the Breeder Reactor* are sure to get u*. I refer
to those wonder machines that the electric com¬
panies are calling Clean Energy for the Future.
What is not explained with such slogans ia that
breeder reactor* not only create energy, they
create atomic waste, breeding new fissionable
material-- including plutonium. Plutonium is
well named for the ged of hell. Chemically a
poison and radioactively a horror. II does not
go away; wherever we put it. it will get back
to us.

The mere radiation from the atomic crap
is hardly the problem. The radioactive polaons
are getting into the oceans. They are getting
into the clean waters of Ihe land. (A December
1973 new* report, for Instance, revealed that
a 1968 leak of radioactive chemicals was into
the water supply of Bloomfield, Colorado.) Now,
atomic enthusiasts call It a Disposal Problem,
like the queation of where to bury the garbage.
But it's a vary different problem. Wherever we
put It, it will come beck. The sea’ No. that’ll
be poleoned after the containsrs go. Deep wells' 1
The mountains? But there Is no place that can¬
not be guaranteed against earthquake and re¬
cycling. II will com* back. Though dosens of
generations might survive It, it will be waiting.

But the breeder reactor* multiply this
output. Perhaps we could survive the the waste
for a few hundred years, mi it cornea back out
But the other part of It la the nasionebie material
which can be made into backyard bombs.

That's the kicker. With more and more
fissionable crud being disgorged, its availability
for terrorists who want to build their own in¬
creases. Ralph Lapp pointed out last year that
the stuff was shipped In unguarded trucks, and
one or two good hijacking* would enable any
bright kid to build hia own dirty A-bomb. By
the year 2000 It is nol inconceivable thsi bootleg
atomic weapons will be aa widespread as hand¬
gun* in Detroit-- and as much uaed.

But now. with the breeder reactors - ir
lots of countries-- pouring the atufT out. the era
of atomic plenty is here. The smaller countries
who want them are getting their atomic weapons
- though holding back assembly of the parts,
for various reasons. It ia generally believed
among bomb-watchers, far instance, that India
and Israel have theirs anytime they want.

Add this to the greet avalanche of missiles,
tall and homy in their ailos, ready to go on two,
later three or four, sides. (The U S. official
arsenal now stands at the explosive equivalent
of 5 billion tons of TNT. a ton or TNT for every
human being. And that's just the explosive part,
not the fallout; a fraction of these bombs could
destroy ell life on earth by its seething residue.)
And now. because of the SALT talks, we may
expect a new and drastic increase of this Readiness
Posture. Hoo boy. What ia there ti any.

So there it is. folks, merry times ahead.
Humanity may end with a bang (thermonuclear
exchanges, or Just desultory firings urtil we’re
all poisoned or sterile), or a whimper (universal
starvation), or, I would anticipate, some spastic
combination of the two. and all within the (pos¬
sible) lifetime of the average reader. This Is.
at any rale, what I think most likely.

Except of ecu me we won't see it happen
that way. We'll watch the starvations on TV
(as we did Biafra, Bangladesh, now West Africa,
wliot next... India?), and tsk about the poor
foreigners who can’t take cere of themselves.

And as the problems increase and move toward
out heartland, it'll be blamed on environmentalists
and on the news media, till bang.

Or maybe not. Just maybe.

But we've aii got to get access lo the Club
of Home models, and look for holes or strategies.

If computer modelling systems doing this kind of
work arc made widely enough available, perhaps
some precocious grade-schooler or owlish hobbyist
will find some way out that the others haven't
hit on...

We've got to think hard about everything.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Frederick Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth, The Space
Merchants. Ballamine, paper.

Thomas C. Schelling. The Strategy of Conflic t.
Paper.

The Grcot American Bomb Machin e (citation not
handy). Paperback.

A book culled Cold Dawn (citation not handy;
originally published in the New Yorker )
presents a most discouraging view of
this country's actions ir the SALT lalka.

One Access Catalog, nol lo be named here, gives
a recipe for an atonic bomb. Very funny,
ha ha. "The U-235 we are using, (although
Plutonium will work just as well) is a
radioactive substance anti deserves some
cart In handling. II ia NOT radioactive
enough to kill with limited axpoaurc. but
don't sleep with it or anything." And *o on.
Thanks a lot. fellaa.

Ralph Lapp had a piece in the Now York Time s
Magazine last year, pointing out that
plutonium ia shipped in unguarded truck*
and it's only a matter of lime before
purks get their hands on il...

A piece in a recent Esquire . "Did There Ever
Com* a Point in Tim* When Thera Were
Porty-Three Differenl Theories about
Watergate? Yea. to the Best of Our
Recollection.” la a very helpful general
w>urce, especially far those who suspect a
connection between "Walergele" and the
assassinations of the Kennedy*. Malcolm
X. Marlin Luther King. etc. But for a
real chill see "Mae Brussel!'* Conapiraey
Newsletter" in the March (?) 1974
Realist, as well as "Who la Organized
Crime and Why Are They Saying Such
Awful Thing* About It." same iaaua.

Glen A. Love and Rhoda M. Love. Ecological

Crisis : Reading* for Survival . Harcourt.

$4 (paper). A quick way lo catch up on
soma bad stud. Four bucks well spent.

William Lelaa. Tit* Domination of Nature .

BrazUler, 17.

For a dazzling, romantic and optimistic viaw of
the future, aee Dimension* of Chang* by
Don Fsbun (Glencoe Pres*. 85 in paper).

The Futurist magazine goes out lo member* of
ihe World Future Society. An Association
far The Study of AHemetive Futures.

Post OITlci Box 30368, Bathsada Branch.
Washington. DC 20014. The magazine
used lo be pretty sappy and optimistic,
but teams lo be acquiring sophistication.

.tun*Id kotulak, "The Lifeboat tthic."

Chicago Tribune Magazine , 29 Apr 74,

Of courts, population continues

Would you believe that the greatest avail¬
able computer service is for the kiddies?

For four bucks and a half, an outfit called
Me-Books will send, to a child you designate,
a story of which he is the hero, in which his
friends and siblings appear, and whose action
involves his address and birthday.

Kids adore it. Children who don’t like
reading treasure the volumes; children who do
like reading love them just as much.

I can personally report, at least on the
basis of the one I ordered (M^ Friendly Giraffe )
that the story is beautifully thought out. warm,
loving, and cleverly plotted. In other words,
far from being a fast-buck scheme, this thing
has been done right . It's a splendid children’s
story. (I won't reveal the plot, but the Giraffe's
birthday, name and home address are related
to those of the protagonist.)

Moreover, it has three-color illustrations,
is on extra-heavy paper and is bound in hard
covers .

(In case you're interested, any of the
three programming languages expounded earlier
in the book would be suitable for creating a
Me-Book: depending on the language chosen,
the holes left for the child’s own name would be
alphabetic variables, segment gaps or null arrays
-- anyhow, you could do it.)

Astute readers of the Me-Book will note
that while it's not readily obvious, only the lines
on which personalized information appear have
been printed in the computer's lineprinter. The
others have all been pre-printed on a press.
Indeed, the personalizations appear on only one
side of each page, the whole book being one
long web of paper that's run through the line-
printer just once before being cut and bound.

But it's so cleverly written and laid out that the
story moves on beautifully even on the pages
that don’t mention the child's name.

As an experiment, the author tried sending
for a copy of M^. Friendly Giraffe as told about
a little boy named Tricky Dick Nixon, residing
at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C.
The result was extremely gratifying, and well
worth the $4.50. Herewith some excerpts.

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BOOK SHIPPED TO GBOUM-UP

,,, r in a place called
Once upon » tilt. i v

►here 1 ived a little boy
Washington, there

nailed Tricky Dick Nixon.

.... «.», ncK ..-t 3- » «*■«» —

He had adventures that other little bo/s and g
just dreaa of*

This is the .tot, of on. of his siver.tatos.

It „ the stoij of the da, thst tsi«Y «<*

a giraffe.

As the giraffe cane closer and closer.
Tricky Dick started to yonder hoe in the
vorld he las going to look him in the eye .

Tricky Dick knew there *ere uo jungles in
Washington. Especially on Pennsylvania Ave.

But Tricky rick »«•* «« * U ’*- le '° rri ' a '

pirst, because he “as 8 ,er * b - a? * la "' le b r

End second, because he knew that his fnena,
giraffe, -ever take hi. anyplace bad.

hoee.

Tric *' Dib *

B ' Ck i" "ashingtoo.

on Pennryi vaaia

vit h

a story to

- h ;,- t# teu tis

Lcky ft

•lCK

tiding off
Houid

f Relieved if

that

on the

‘Ml’t seen

B ' C ‘ lMb b e a here

ki* that day.

ciraff e . s

Oack.

to the

hose who

would be aany other exciting adventures
icky Dick and his friends.

iybe, just aaybe, if you're a very good

PERSONALIZED ME-BOOKS'*" NOW AVAILABLE:

c yw'

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Your child and the chiids (needs
and pels take a iungie mp with
a friendly giralle Personalized
m over 70 places

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Adventure

People m me land ol candy and
cake lell all about your chiids
exact birthday Irom birlhslone to
lamous birthdays

c7Vly~

Jungle Holiday

T ho child ol your choice and
the giralle visit the animals m
an amusement park Personal
ized throughout

cTWy-

Special Christmas

As Santas helper, your child
visits the Santas ol ihe different
countries and learns the true
meaning ol Christmas

For additional Me-Books" 1 written around a child ol your choice, complete an
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MB2 11633 Victory Blvd . North Hollywood Calil 91609 Enclose *3 95 plus
50C lor postage and handling (Caht residents add 20* lor sales lax ) Be sure
to slate which Me-Book“ you desire and include the following information

KKS(MUII2(D STORY DAU

II ten*" .1,10, «,bgn b*o. it n(H i»*tibk o< ** JoeKAtu* Lt«l RUHR I hi < hjiniH U«r »« be «uttr» «t"oi,l *1

RRIHI CltARll. cm OuiAciti p«> soict amt Me space brim, mips It urn* ft.ilttflli

II *ot enoofi, space *bbte»*W

CMIV.M ^ *"** b * H T !<««•» hMlKI Mil

I MUM L,ahu IMIllirikl____

c.m> wviw-.ir.-M *imimi ij* nan liRn i„u_ lawu>

Abcul these fcstny ausnheps
cnyoup checks.

You will note that aU bank checks now
have funny-looking numbers along their bottoms
They go like this:

O IHU5 E,?m

The numbers are odd but recognizable.
The last four thingies are punctuation marks,
which presumably can mean anything the pro¬
grammer wants them to. (J n other words,
frankly, I don't know their names or standard
functions.)

which stands for Magnetic Ink Character Recor¬
ding. They are printed in magnetic ink-- not
magnetic go’s you could record on it, like mag¬
netic tape, but chock-full of iron and vitamins
so that as its blobs whiz past a special read
head, they cause a specific sequence of pulses
in the parallel circuits of the read head that can
be decoded as the specific number or mark.

The MICR system was designed in the
late fifties, with the technology convenient at
that time, and would certainly not be designed
that way now. Nevertheless, these weird-looking
symbols have inspired various

RIDICULOUS TVPE-FflCES,

which apparently look to the public like the
latest hotcha whizbang zippity up-to-date futur¬
istic stuff, even though to the knowledgeable
person they bring back the late fifties. (In
fact there are no letters in the MICR character-
set.)

What, then (you may ask) would symbols
designed for computers look like if they had
been designed more recently?

We were just getting to that. In fact,
there are two such alphabets, called OCR (for
Optical Character Recognition). They have
been standardized so everybody can design
equipment and/or programs to work with them.
They are called the A and B optical fonts, or,
for completeness. OCR(A) and OCR(B).

They are very disappointing.

OCR (A) is a little sexier. At least it
looks like something . (Evidently it's slightly
easier to deal with and design for.) But the
other one, OCR(B), just looks like the alphabet
next door. Here they are.

ABCDEFGHIJKLfl
NOPflRSTUVUXYZ
0123451,75=!

. : :,= + /$*"S

» -<>y.r j’sm

ONA0o*a£¥

1234567890
ABCDEFGHIJ KLM
NOPQRSTUVWXYZ
abedefg hijk Lm
nopqrs tuvwxyz
* + - = /.,

?!()<>C]%£&a A
b£$|\| - ¥

0Cxl(a)

OCK(t)

THE ESS

The national phone company (usually
called affectionately. "Ma Bell") has drastically
changed its switching methods in the last few
years. They are replacing the old electromech¬
anical switches, or "crossbars," with a new
device called the ESS, or Electronic Switching
System. If there's one in your area you may
hear about it in their jolly news sheet that you
jet with the bill.

In the old crossbar days, a phone con¬
nection was a phone connection and that was
that. Now. with the ESS, all sorts of new com¬
binations are possible: the ESS has stored pro¬
grams that determine its operation. If you
dialled a non-working number, it jumps to a
program to take care of that. It does all sorts
of things by special program, and new programs
can be created for special purposes. Now the
phone company is trying to find the services
that people will pay for. Having calls rerouted
temporarily to other numbers? Linking up
several people in a conference call? Storing
your most-called numbers, so you can reach
them with a single or double digit?

These particular services are now being
offered experimentally.

The way it works is this: there are a
number of programs stored in a core memory;
the only "output device" of the system consists
of its field of reed switches, arranged to close
circuits of the telephone network.

Depending on the numbers that have been
dialled, and whatnot, the ESS jumps to a specific
program, and that tells it to connect an incoming
call to particular other circuits, or to ring other
lines, or whatever.

It's really neat.

There are only a couple of things to worry

about.

One is that it makes wiretapping, not a
complex bother involving clipped wires and men
hunched over in cramped spaces, but a simple
program.

Another is that some people think that
blue-boxers (see nearby) may be able to program
it, from the comfort of their own homes. Mean¬
ing that not just court-authorized wiretaps, but
Joe Schmoe wiretaps, would be possible. Let's
hope not.

HiWOfifcAPft

This has been around for decades, and
has nothing to do with computers, but isn't it
nice?

You write with a pen attached by rods
to a transmitter ; somewhere else, a pen attached
by rods to a receiver duplicates what you have
written.

What is being transmitted consists of the
measured sideways motion ("change in x"), the
measured up-and-down motion ("change in y"),
and the condition of the pen ("up" or "down").
What would these days be called "three analog
channels, multiplexed on a single line."

These only cost a couple of hundred dollars.
Why has nobody been using them for computer
input?

Minicomputers handle various

Sugar Creek, Texas will have 3000 homes
with a minicomputer-based alarm system. Evidently
various automatic sensors around each house sniff
for fires and burglars, as well as providing panic
buttons for medical emergencies.

The system uses dual Novas (one a backup),
and prints out the news to fire and police dispatchers
on a good old 33ASR Teletype. (Digital Design.

May 73, 16.)

(Mi 0? TUOtf wv

"Overpay your phone bill by one cent.
It drives the computer crazy."

Nope. The amount of payment gets
punched in and goes through the gears
quite normally.

If you want to put together your own computer-on-a-chip,
or any other complex integrated circuit, a complete simulation-
verification-layout-and-fabrication service is available from
Motorola, Semiconductor Products Div. , P.O. Box 20924, Phoenix,
Arizona. Presumably it costs a mint, but after that you can roll
out your circuits like cookies.

Your circuit is overlaid on their beehive-chip of logical
subcircuits, called a Polycell. You use their MAGIC language
(Motorola Automatically Generated Integrated Circuits), which
then feeds a resulting circuit data structure to a program called
SIMUL8 (yuk yuk) to try out the circuit without building it.

That way you can supposedly be sure before they make the final
masks.

[ always figured that the day of Computer
Hobbyism would arrive when the folks at Heathkit
offered a build-it-yourself computer. But you
know what they came out with instead lust year?

A general interface for hooking things to the PDP-8.

It was a truly stellar group that reported to
Judge Sirica on 15 Jan 1974 that the 18-minute
Watergate tape buzz had at least five starts and stops.

The six panelists included:

Richard Bolt, a founder of

Bolt, Beranek and Newman, Inc.
Franklin Cooper, head of

Haskins Laboratories, >

Thomas Stockham, audio resynthesizer
extraordinary (seep.lj^M)

The news, however, generally referred to
them as "technicians."

QWi^TONG,

a swell video game now in bars, probably
controls the four-player pingpong on the screen
with a minicomputer or microprocessor.

Especially exciting is the social possi¬
bility of horizontal screens for other fun inter¬
personal stuff. As well as collaborative work.
(But boy, let's hope the radiation shielding is
good.)

The Computer Diet by Vincent Antonetti (Evans Pub.)
shows the author sitting on the deskplate of a 360 console.

The inside consists principally of charts he recom
mends for weight lose. "The power of a modern digital
computer" interpolated the tables. A slide rule might have
have been simpler.

The thing is, he presents a paper on the thermo-
lics of weight loss which may be important; in this he
the difference equations which are the heart of his

Kirk Brainerd. of L.A., is using compu¬
ters for a registry of people with something to
teach. He hopes that if people are mutually a-
vailable to each other at a deep enough level,
people can begin to act out of altruism in general.

A8TROPLASH. etc.

There are various computerized astrology
services. Given your date of birth, and hour
if known, they'll type out your signs. explan¬
ations, etc. Presumably there is a text network
which the system selects among according to
"reinforcing tendencies," etc., among the entities
thought to be influential.

Conceivably this could do nine-tenths of
what a talented human astrologer does, and with
the same validity, whatever that may be. In
any case it’s probably a lot cheaper.

COMPUT-

EROTICA

ROT

Is it too soon for a
computer pornography contest?

(Is it too late?)
See p. "?*>"•

People think computers are rigid
and invariant. This (as stated else¬
where In this book) is due to the systems
which people have imposed , and then
blamed, on the computer.

The fact is that computers are now
being set up to give new flexibility to
manufacturing processes. Computers,
directly connected to milling machines,
grind metal into any conceivable shape
much faster than a human craftsman. To
change the result, change the program--
in a fraction of a second. Fabric des¬
ign has been done on computer screens;
the obvious next step is to have the
computer control the loom or knitting
machine and immediately produce what-
ever's been designed.

Custom clothing: soon we may look
forward to tailoring services that store
your fteasurements and can custom-tailor
a suit for you to any new fashion, in
minutes. (But will the price beat Hong
Kong?) Customized printed matter is
already here (see "Me-Books," p.6"7).
Wherever people want individual varia¬
tions of a basic manufacturing process,
computers can do it.

The Telephone Company (at least in
Illinois and Indiana) offers a speaker on
"The Shadowy World of Electronic Snooping"
to interested groups.

Modern uiuqt, she 29, interested
in recursive relations and reverse
Polish culture. Phone a must.
Contact box RS-232 (t see p.

BETCHA DIDN’T KNOW...

that the IRS hasn't been able to do Instant
matching of W-2 forms to tax returns. That'U
be fixed in fiscal *74. and interest and dividend
peymenU in '75. (TIME, 31 Dec 73, 17.)

Y&wmit, u-ep**)

This is an outrageous misnomer. The
computer is only carrying out, most speedily,
what hardened politocoes have always done:
FACTIONAL ANALYSIS, now possible with new¬
found precision on the basis of certain election
returns.

This is based on the cynical, and fairly
reliable, view that people vote according to
what faction of the greater populace they belong
to-- middle-class white liberals, blue-collar
non-union members, and so on. The factions
change slowly over time, and people move
among them, but the fact of factionalism remains
unchanged.

Well. By the close of a major election
campaign, most factions can be pretty well pre¬
dicted, especially as to presidential choice, or
what proportion of that faction will go for a
given candidate.

But some factions' reactions are not cer¬
tain up to the day of the ballot.

So. "Computer predictions” of elections
basically break the country into its factional
divisions, state by state and district by district,
and then tabulate who can be predicted to vote
for whom on a factional basis.

Then what's the suspense?

The suspense comes from the uncertain
factions — groups whose final reactions aren't
known as the election starts.

Certain election districts are known to
be chock full of the types of people whose reac¬
tion isn't known.

The final "computer prediction" simply
consists of checking out how those districts
voted, concluding how those factions are going
in the present election, and extending this pro¬
portion through the rest of the country.

It’s often painfully accurate-- but, thank
god, not always. When it isn't don't blame
"the computer." Thank human cantankerosity.

THt W c^ecXoor eooflJ^

may or may not be a real computer-- friends
have told me St isn’t— but it's certainly a good
idea.

When you pull your late-model Volkswagen
into a dealer's service area, the guys can just
roll out a cable and plug it into the corresponr
ding socket in your vehicle. At the other end
of the cable is some sort of device which tests
a series of special circuits throughout the car
for Good Condition. These circuits indicate
that things are working properly-- lights, plugs,
points, brakes and so on.

This is the same technique used by NASA
up to the final moment of COMMIT LAUNCH-- a
system of circuits monitors the conditions of
whatever can be monitored, to make sure all's
functioning well. It's more expensive to wire it
up that way, but it makes checking out the
rocket-- or the car— that much eaaier.

YOUR AUTOMOBILE COMPUTER

Didja know, huh, we're going to have
computers in our cars? We refer here to two
things—

anti-skid controllers . which are realty
just special circuits-- you know,
"analog computers"— to compensate
among skidding wheels. Turns out
that this is apparently more sensi¬
tive and reliable than even your good
drivers who enjoy controlling skids.
Already advertised for some imports.

grand bus electronics (see p. )• Since
the electrical part of the automobile
is getting so blamed complicated,
the Detroit Ironmongers have decided
to switch to a grand bus structure
instead of having all those switches
and things separate anymore. Should
make the whole thing far easier to
service and customize.

Presumably this will all be
under the control of a microprocessor.
(See ■) This means that the

car can have things like a Cold-
Weather Startup Sequence-- a program
that starts the car, turns on the
heater, monitors the engine and
cabin temperature, and bleats the
horn, twice, politely when it's all
ready-- all at a time preset by the
dashboard clock.

Presumably Detroit is not yet
planning to go this far. But because
of the auto industry's anomalously
huge influence in America, some have
expressed the fear that this move
-- toward the integrated-circuit,
digitally-controlled grand bus—
would effectively put Detroit in con¬
trol of the entire electronics industry.

The ever-clever Japanese are computerizing
faster, better and more deeply than we are.

They now have a prototype taxi operating
under computer control. They're calling it, at
least for export, Computer-controlled Vehicle
System (CVS).

Basically it's like an Elevated Railway—
you climb up and wait-- but when you get in,
you punch a button for your destination. Accor¬
ding to Hideyuki Hayashi of the Ministry of In¬
dustry and International Trade, the system will
be operational in Tokyo within the decade, and
is the "cleanest, safest, quickest transport sys¬
tem ever devised by man." Think fast. Detroit.

(A nice point: one of the most important
features of such a system is that the vehicles
don’t react to each other, as do vehicles in the
existing Human-controlled Vehicle System (HVS).

A whole line of the cars can be accelerated or
slowed simultaneously, a crucial aspect of their
flexibility and safety. Nothing con possibry
go long.)

(Leo Clancy. "Now-- Computer-Controlled,
Driverless Cars," National Enquirer 3 Mar 74,
24-5.) ~

SIC TRANSIT

Some of the sappier new Urban Transit
Systems give you a ticket with a magnetic stripe
on the back. Each time you ride you must push
the card into an Entrance Machine, which pre¬
sumably does something to the stripe, till finally
the ticket runs out and you have to pay more
money.

Secrecy of the recording code is an impor¬
tant aspect of the thing. Indeed, waggish gossip
claims that some such systems start with a blank
magnetic stripe and just sdd stuff to It, meaning
the card can be waahed clean with a magnet by
larcenous commuters. But this seems unlikely.

THOSE THINGS ON THE RAILROAD CARS

As we lean on the fence a-chawin’ an'
a-watchin' the trains go by. we note strange
insignia on their sides, in highly reflective
Scotch -Lite all begrimed by travel.

Basically it's a stack of horizontal stripes
in red, blue and other colors. This Is ACI,
for Automatic Car Identification , R may yet
straighten out the railroads.

In this neolithic industry, it is not known
at any given time where a railroad company a
cars are, and aomo peculiar etiquette governs
their unrequested uBe by other firm# in the
industry. Yet the obvious solution may coroe
about: a running inventory of where all the cars
are. where each one is going, what's in it.
and who that belongs to. But, of course, that's
still in the works. Revolutionary ideas take time.

TWK65 feu MY IN iHto

Everywhere you go computers lurk. Yet
they wear so many faces it’s impossible to figure
what's going on.

Guidelines are hard to lay down here, but
if you look for examples of things you’ve already
run into in this book, it may help some.

Terminals you can presumably recognize.

Microprocessors are harder, because you
don't see them. Good rule-of-thumb: any device
which acts with complexity or apparent discretion
presumably incorporates a terminal, minicomputer
or microprocessor.

Two other things to watch for: transaction
systems and data base systems.

A transaction system is any system that
takes note of, and perhaps requires verification
of, transactions. Example: the new point-of-sale
systems (POS). This is what's about to replace
the cash register.

In the supermarket of the future, every
package will have a bar code on a sticker, or
printed on the wrapper. Instead of the checkout
clerk looking at the label and punching the a-
mount of the sale into the cash register— an
error-prone and cheat-prone technique which
requires considerable training-- your New Im¬
proved Checkout Clerk will wave a wand over
the bar code. The bar code will be sensed by
the wand, and transmitted to a control computer,
which will ring it up by amount and category
(for tax purposes), and even keep track of
inventory . noting each object as it is removed
from stock.

Here is what your bar code will look like.

(A circular code, which was already turning up
on some TV dinners, has been eliminated by the
bar code. This is unfortunate, since the scan¬
ner necessary to read the bar code is electron¬
ically more complicated, but there we are.)

(Incidentally, while this does arrest the
classic cashier's cheat-- ringing up excessive
purchases on the customers, then having a con¬
federate walk through equivalent amounts— the
consumer is still entirely prone to cheating by
the store in the computer program . Remember,
it's 1974. So you still may have to check your
tapes, folks.)

Data base systems are any systems which
keep track of a whole lot of stuff, often with
complex pointer techniques (see "Data Structures,"
P- ZG)- A cute example is the message service
now offered by Stuckey’s snack/souvenir stands
all over the country. You may leave messages
for your friends or loved ones on the road; they
can stop at any Stuckey's and ask for their
messages, just as if it was a telephone answering
service. (You're listed by your phone number—
is this to avoid pranks? And what about people
with no phones?) It’s free and a neat idea.
(Obviously, the messages are stored on the disk
of a big central computer, and queried from
terminals at the individual stands.)

The potential dangers of transaction systems
are fairly obvious from the supermarket example,
but they fan out in greater complexity as the
systems get more complex. Credit cards, for
instance, were only made possible by computers
and computerized credit verification; but it is
only now, fifteen or so years into the credit-card
era, that laws protect the cardholder against
unlimited liability if he loses it.

Yet we plunge ahead, and it is obvious why.
Transaction systems managed in, and by, com¬
puters allow more flexible and (in principle)
reliable operations. For instance, in the secu¬
rities business, thousands of stock certificates
are lost and mislaid, and the transaction paper
must be typed, shuffled, put in envelopes, sent,
opened, shuffled again, compared... all by hand.
Little wonder they're working on an Automated
Stock Exchange System. But if it's taken fifteen
years to get the implicit bugs out of credit cards
... not to mention the frequent allegations that
much Wall Street "inefficiency" is actually the
disguised marauding of Organized Crime...
uh-oh. (If they can buy the best lawyers, they
can probably buy the best programmers.)

Then there is the Checkless Society. This
is a catchphrase for an oft-advocated system that
allows you to transfer money instantly by compu¬
ter; supposedly some such thing is working al¬
ready in France. Again, they better get it pretty
safe before a sane man will go up in it.

The safety of such systems i9 of course
a matter of immense general concern. IBM
portentiously (sic) announced its intent to spend
millions of dollars on "computer security" a few
years ago. However, a few million dollars is
not going to plug the security holes in the IBM
360, and evidently the 370 is just about as vul¬
nerable.

(In this light, even the greatest IBM-haters
will have to admit that there may be a proper
motive behind IBM's current refusal to let others
use its new operating system language: that way
they may be able to prevent special holes in the
system from becoming known to programmers.)

It is interesting that one profession seems
to be stepping forward to try to improve this
situation: the auditing profession, devoted to
verification of financial situations of companies,
seems to be branching into the verification of
computer programs and the performance of com¬
plex systems. This will be great, if it works.
Cynics, however, may note that auditors have
permitted some remarkable practices in the
"creative" accounting of recent years. (Obvious¬
ly the way to check out the safety of big systems
is to offer bounty to those who can break its
security. But who is willing to subject a system
to a test like that?)

Hereabouts are a few other computerish
things you may run into which more or less
defy categorization.

\—V

THE COMPUTER GRAVEYARD

In the mid-3ixties there was a junkyard
in Kingston, N.Y. that was like an automobile
graveyard-- except piled high with dead com¬
puters.

They were from various manufacturers.

The guys would smash them with sledgehammers,
or other awful things, to make sure they could
never work again. Then you could buy the
circuit cards. I saw 1401s five high, Univac
File Computers, tape drives... it was an elec¬
tronic nut's paradise. You could decorate your
den with huge old control panels, mag disks
and whatnot. It seems to be gone now. They
forbade pictures.

should of course be called MATCHUP DATING,
since there is nothing particularly computerish
about either the process or its intended result.

But there we go again: word-magic, the impli¬
cit authority of invoking the word Computer.

(See "Cybercrud," p. J .)

In the early sixties, a perky young fella
at the Harvard B-School, I believe, one Jeff Tarr,
came up with the notion of a computerized dating
service. The result was Operation Match, an
immense financial success, which sort of came
and went. No followup studies were ever done
or success statistics gathered, unfortunately,
but they certainly had their fun.

The basic principle of "computer dating"
is perfectly straightforward. Applicants send in
descriptions of themselves and the prospective
dates they would like to meet. The computer
program simply does automatically the sorts of
thing you would do if you did this by hand:
it attempts to find the "best' 1 match betweeen
what everybody wants and what's on hand.

Obviously this could be a matter for
serious operations research: attempting to dis¬
cover the best matchup techniques among things
that never really fit together, detail for detail;
trying to find out, by followup questionnaires,
what trait-matchings seemed to produce the best
result, etc. But such serious matchup-function
research remains, so far as I know, to be even
begun.

Obviously there are several problems.
Demographically it is almost never true that
"for every man there's a woman"-- in every
age-bracket there's almost always an imbalance
of the opposite sex in the corresponding eligible
age-bracket, either too many or too few. But
more then that, there is little likelihood that
the traits women want are adequately represen¬
ted among the available males, or vice versa.
For introduction services it's obviously worse:
there is no balance likely between what comes
in one door and what comes in the other. The
service can only do its be3t with the available
pool of people-- and make believe it's somehow
made ideal by the use of the computer. It's
like an employment office: applicants don't
match openings.

Numerous other dating services have ap¬
peared, some of which don't even pretend to
use the computer (and others which claim to
be a registry for nonstandard sexual appetites)
but none that's gotten the attention of the orig¬
inal Project Match.

But there's no question who got the best
dates out of that one. Jeff Tarr.

—*-^

DO YOU GOT RHYTHM?

A device called the BIO-COMPUTER (trade

Now, moat of the big systems you run into
tend to be a combination of transaction and
data-base system. For instance, suppose you
make an airline reservation. The airline has a
Urge data base to keep track of: the inventory
of all thoae armchairs it 1 a flying around the
country, and the list of who so far have announced
plane to ait in them, and in some casea what
they intend to eat. When you buy your ticket,
that transaction then gets you put in the listing.
Same for car rentals and so on.

<oj)

1*- W.cm*

>0 (*j vyk

\ (p \—£~Dv

tioio ofem wr CK> r

mark) purportedly helps you predict your "body
beats," telling you what days are the right sort
of time to do particular things in terms' of your
own biological energies. The object coats $15
postpaid from BIO-COMPUTER. Dept. CLB/DM
(why not?), 964 Third Ave. , NY NY 10022.

The question with all such special purpose
devices— "fishing computers.” horse-racing
computers, etc., is always whether the theory
and formulas which are built into them are cor¬
rect. There is no ready way to tell.

One possibility, nice and expensive, is to
rent a number of mailing lists from a single
mailing-list house, with them guaranteeing that
they'll compare all the lists you choose and
not send to any person more than once.

But as you may be suspecting, this costs
money. All this screening and intercomparing
requires computer time, and so, even though
you are getting a more and more perfect mailing,
you are paying more and more and more money
for it. So you can see why reasonable business¬
men are willing to send out ads even when they
know some recipients will get several duplicates.

Another interesting point. There are
mailing lists for all kinds of different possible
customers. The possibilities are endless.
Minority-group doctors. People interested in
both stamp collecting and flowers (you’d have
to get a company with both lists, and have them
go through them for the duplicates ... you get
the idea).

Note that mailing lists are priced according
to their desirability. Weeded mailing lists, fea¬
turing only Live Ones, people who've ordered
big in recent times, are more expensive. Lists
of doctors, who buy a lot, .are more expensive
than lists of social workers. And so on.

Then there's the matter of the pitch.

The ad's phrasing may be built around
the mailing plan. Some circulars come right out
and tell the recipient he's going to get several
copies because he’s such a wonderful person.

THEN there are those advertisements that
are actually printed by the computer , or at least
certain lines are filled in with the recipient's
name and possibly some snazzy phrases to make
him think it's a personal letter. Who responds
to such things I don't know. My favorite was
the one-- I wish I could find it to include here
— that went something like

You'll really look swell, Mr. Nelson
walking down Main Street of New York
in your sharp-looking new slacks...

I don’t know whether I enjoyed the spaces or
the Main Street more.

But you see how this works. There's
this batch-processing program, see, and the
names and addresses are on one long tape, and
the tape goes through, and the program takes
one record (a name and address), and decides
whether to call the addressee "Mr.," "Ms." or
whatever, and then plugs his name into the
printout lines that give it That Personal Touch;
and then the mailing envelope or sticker is
printed; and the tape moves on to the next
record.

We may look forward to increasing en¬
croachments on our time and trust by the direct
mail industry: especially in better and better
quack letters that look as though they've really
been personally typed to you by a real human
being. (It is apparently legal for letters to be
signed by a fictitious person within a company.)
In the future we may expect such letters to be
sent on fine paper, typed individually on good
typewriters, and convincingly phrased to make
us think a real personal pitch is being tendered.

There is, however, a final solution.

Theodor H Nelson
458 U 20Th St
Nejf York, Ny 100 1 1

Great news! for thfNelson)f anily!

Houldn't ylu like your money to work for you full tine...
even when t°u*re asleep?

How Ison family can save...right -at their own

Passbook Savings Plan which
•ouarterly or even

^hm**** t tu e " a 'u

•V-

Dear Reader:

tio n and make you a highly-roted prespect for everything ^

from maK T’i' 1 n mut ual funds .__

you've undoubtedly -heard everything" by ^e »h y

of promises and premium. I won't try to top any of thee,.

If you subscribe to Wu .i,*. you won't get rich quick.
You won't bowl over friends and busu’^"
clever '

12=5 P ° nTL *~° COLORAOO 00300

ER, COLORAOO 80302 ^

0aar *r. Nel son :

ear, io° tn b Tl,is is "« an oral-

It can save you money off the r<JrTT? fferf ■ a aiaf 7 a zine.

won't appeal tif it per _
’ll ippeal to we think it

Because it
aives vou

YOU CAN GET OFF ALL MAILING LISTS
— that is, the ones "participating" in the
Association- - by writing to

Direct Mail Advertising Association
Public Relations Department
230 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10017

They will send a blank. If you fill it in
they’ll process it and delete your name from
mailing lists of all participating companies.

Presumably this won’t help with
X-rated or stamp-collecting lists, but It
ought to keep you from getting semiannual
gift catalogs from places like The House of
Go-Go Creative, Inc. and those million
solicitations from Consumer Reports and
that File Box company.

You call up the bank and ask your balance
and they say, "I’m afraid 1 can’t get that infor¬
mation. You see, it’s on a computer."

(See Basic Rejoinder, nearby.)

Well, the reason it's this way is that
they're handling things in Batch (see p.^S )
and they aren't storing your account on disk,
or if they are they don’t have a terminal they
can query it with.

But to say that they can’t get the infor¬
mation because it's on a computer is a typical
use of the computer as an excuse (see Cyber-
crud, p. $ ); and second, if the person be¬
lieves this to be an explanation, it's a sign of
the intimidation and obfuscation that have been
sown among the clerks who don't understand
computers.

Write them a letter. Change banka. Let’s
get the banks to put on more and more citizen
services. Rah!

)>MNwr

6*\roKK!

Everybody blames the computer.

People are encouraged to blame the
computer. The employees “of a firm, by
telling outside people that it's the
computer's fault, are encouraging public
apathy through private deceit. The pre¬
tense is that this thing, the computer,
is rigid and inhuman (see "The Myth of
the Computer," p. 7 ) and makes all

kinds of stupid mistakes.

Computers rarely make mistakes. If
the computing hardware makes a hardware
error in a billion operations, it may
be noticed and a repairman called. (Of
course, once in a billion operations is
once in a thousand seconds, or perhaps
every ten minutes. That ought to be
mentioned.) Anyhow, innocent gadgetry
is not what forces you to make stupid
multiple choices on bureaucratic forms;
mere equipment isn't what loses your
subscription records;

IT'S

THE

SYSTEM .

By system we mean the whole setup: the
computer, the accessories that have been
chosen for it, its plan of operation or
program, and the way files are kept and
complaints handled.

Don't blame the computer.

Blame the system; blame the program¬
mer; blame the procedures; best of all,
blame the company. Let them know you
will take your business to wherever they
have human beings. Same for governmental
agencies: write your congressman. And
so on.

4 V W

we should all practice and* have ready at the
tip of our tongues:

WHY THE HELL NOT? YOU'RE THE ONES WITH
THE COMPUTERS. NOT ME!

Let's froth up a little citizen indignation here.

In principle we no longer need account
numbers.

Now that text processing facilities are
available in moBt (if not all) major computer
languages, the only excuse for not using these
features is the programmer's notion of his own
convenience— not that of the outside customer
or victim.

Example . Someone I know got brand new

^■MsriH»4^aM*and credit

cards. He made no note of their numbers. Then

he lost them both. Duly he reported the losses.
Neither service could look him up . they said .
without the numbers . Not having used them, he
had no bills to check. Even though he was the
only person at that address with anything like
that name. And why not, pray tell? Either be¬
cause they were fibbing, or because they had
not seen fit to create a simple straightforward
program for the purpose. (See Basic Rejoinder,
nearby.)

I have heard of similar cases involving
major life insurance companies. Don't lose the
numbers . Let’s all dance to it:

When anything is issued to you,
Write the number down.

"CpHtoTOL!"

TH*TJ>0H

Few of us can help feeling outrage at
the book clubs, or subscription offices, or
billing departments, that don’t reply to our

letters. Or reply inappropriately , with a form
printout that doesn't match the problem.

First let's understand how this happens.

These outfits are based on using the com¬
puter to handle all correspondence and trans¬
actions. The "office” may not have any people
in it at all-- that is, people whose job it is
to understand and deal sensibly with the prob¬
lems of customers. Instead, there may just be
keypunch operators staffing a Batch System, set
up by someone who has long since moved on.

The point of a batch system (see p.fST)
is to save money and bother by handling every¬
thing in a controlled flow. This does not mean
in principle that things have to be rigid and
restrictive, but it usually means it in practice.
(See "The Punch Card Mentality," p. £<? .)

The system is set up with only a fixed number
of event types, and so only those events are
recognized as occurring. Most important, your
problem is assumed to be one that will be
straightened out in the course of the system’s
flow . While there may be provision for excep¬
tions-- one clerk, perhaps— your problem has
not seemed to him worthy of making an excep¬
tion for.

Here is my solution. It has worked
several times, particularly on book clubs that
ignored typed letters and kept billing me
incorrectly.

Get a roll of white shelf paper, two or
three feet wide and twenty or more feet long.

Write a letter on the shelf paper in magic
marker. Make it big, perhaps six inches to a
word. Legibility is necessary, but don't make
it too easy to read.

Explain the problem clearly.

Now take your punch card— you did get
one, didn't you, a bill or something?-- and
mutilate it carefully. Tear it in quarters, or
cut it into lace, or something. But make sure
the serial number is still legible . Staple it
lovingly to your nice big letter..

Now fold your letter, and find an envelope
big enough for it to fit in, and send it, regis¬
tered or certified mail, to ANY HUMAN BEING,
ACCOUNTING DEPARTMENT, or whatever, and
the company's address.

This really works quite well.

I am assuming here, now, that your prob¬
lem has merit, and you have been denied the
attention required to settle it. If we want justice
we must ourselves be just.

There is one further step, but, again, to
be used only in proportion to the offense. This
step is to be used only if a meritorious commun¬
ication, like that already described, has not
been properly responded to in a decent interval.

We assume that this unjust firm has sent
you a reply envelope or card on which they
must pay postage. Now carefully drafting a
follow-up letter, explain once again, in civil
language, the original problem, your efforts
at attention, and so on. Now put it in a package
with a ten or twelve-pound rock, affix the
reply envelope to the outside, and send it off.

The problem, you see. has been to get
out of the batch stream and be treated as an
exception . Flagrantly destroying the punch card
serves to remove you from the flow in that fash¬
ion. (However, just tearing it a little bit prob¬
ably won't: a card that is intact but torn can
simply be put in a certain slot of the card-punch
and duplicated . Destroy it good and plenty.)

In all these cases remember: the problem
is not that you are "being treated as a number,"
whatever that means, but that your case does
not correctly fall in the categories that have
been set up for it. By forcing attention to your
case as an exception, you are making them
realize that more categories are needed, or more
people to handle exceptions. If more people do
this when they have a just complaint, service
will improve rapidly.

The people who send it out like to call it
personalized advertising and the like. But most
of us call it Junk Mail. And its vagaries are
NOT THE POOR COMPUTER'S FAULT. What gets
people angry derives from the system built
around the poor computer.

You may wonder why you get more and
more seed catalogs, or gift-house catalogs, as
time goes on, even though you never order any¬
thing from them. Or why a deceased member
of the household goes on getting mail year
in and year out, regardless of your angry post¬
cards .

How does it keep coming?

Through the magic of something called the
Mailing List.

And especially the peculiar way that
mailing lists are bought and sold .

THE rUMUL « 01YM

Now, a mailing list is a series of names
and addresses of possible customers. stored on
computer tape or disk.

You can buy the use of a mailing list .

But you cannot buy the mailing list itself.

Suppose you have a brochure advertising
pumpkin-seed relish, which you suggest has
rejuvenating powers. You want this brochure
to go out to rich college graduates.

You go to a mailing-list house.

"I cannot sell you this mailing list out¬
right," says the jolly proprietor, "for it is my
business to sell its use again and again, so
1 do not want anybody else to have a copy of
it.” So you leave 2500 pumpkin-seed relish
brochures with the mailing list company. and
pay them a lot of money. And they swear on
a stack of bibles that they have mailed the bro¬
chures to their special list of rich college grad¬
uates .

Well, let's say you get 250 sales from
that mailing. (10% is fantastically good.) But
out of curiosity you go to another mailing-list
house and have another mailing sent out-- this
one to people who have low incomes and little
education.

This time you get 15% orders.

Now guess what you are acquiring.

A mailing list of your very own. Of peo¬
ple who eat pumpkin-seed relish.

Mailing lists are, you see, generally ren¬
ted blind, with no chance to see the addressees
or check as to whether they've already been
mailed to.

And that explains all the duplications.

If an advertiser is going after a certain
type of customer, and goes to several mailing-
list houses asking for mailings to that particular
type of customer, chances are some people will
be on several of the lists. And since there’s
no way to intercompare the lists, these poor
guys get several copies of the mailing.

(Another way this can happen is if some
cheapskate has his own mailing Hat and doesn't
check it for repeats of the same name. But
writing the computer program to check for
repeats of the same name is not easy-- there
might just be a Robert Jones and a Rob Jones
at the same address-- and these things are not
usually checked manually. They're big.)

Another possibility exists for eliminating
duplications when you rent mailing lists. You
can bring in a magnetic tape with your mailing
list on it, and they can send out the mailing
only to the members of their list who are not
already on your list. That way you still can't
steal their list, since the tape is on their
premises. The trouble is, they can steal your
list, by making a copy of the tape. Oh dear.

From all this, one last speculation creeps
forward.

Ivan Sutherland, in considering the struc¬
ture of subroutining display processors, has
noted that as you get more and more sophisti¬
cated in the design of a display program fol¬
lower, you come full circle and make it a full-
fledged computer, with branch, test, and arith¬
metic operations.

If the somatic mechanism should turn out
to have a program follower as described, it is
not much of a step to suppose that it might have
the traits of an actual computer, i.e., the ability
to follow programs, branch. and perform manip¬
ulations on data bearing on those operations.

In other words, the digital computer may
actually have been invented long before von
Neumann, and we may have billions of them
on our persons already.

It may sound far-fetched, but the mechan¬
isms elucidated at this level are so far-fetched
already that this hardly seems ridiculous.

THE COMPUTER FRONTIER

Regardless of what’s actually in the cell,
it is clear that being able to adapt molecular
chemistry, especially DNA and RNA, to computer
■torage is a beckoning computer frontier.

This would make possible computer mem¬
ories which are far larger and cheaper than
any we now have.

Basically we can separate this into two
aspects:

The DNA Readout. This part of the sys¬
tem would create long molecules holding digital
information.

The DNA Readin. This would convert it
back to electrical form again.

Weird possibilities follow. One is that
(if chemical memory is generic, rather than
idiosyncratic to an individual's neural pathways)
knowledge could be set up somehow in "learned"
DNA form, whatever that might turn out to be,
and injected or implanted rather than taught .
Weird.

As our ability to create clones improves,
we could clone new creatures, or genetic "im¬
provements"-- which, considering the racehorse
and the Pekinese, means "those sorts of non-
viable modifications supported in human society."
And of course that ghastly stuff about building
humanB, or semi-humans; having traits that
somebody or some organization, ulp, thinks is
desirable...

But the real zingef is this one. It might
JuBt be a small accidental printout meant to
teat the facility, or maybe just a program bug—

— but the system could output a virus
that would destroy mankind.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

James D. Watson, Molecular Biology of the Gene.
Beautifully written; meant for highschool
science teachers. But potentially formi¬
dable; if bo, start with his autobiographical
The Double Helix, which is a gas.

Mark Ptashne and Walter Gilbert, "Genetic

Repressors." Scientif ic American , June
1970, 36-44.

S.E. Luria, Life : The Unfinishe d Experiment .

Scribner's.

Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell . Viking, $7.
Eloquent writing to popularize, among
other things, the New Cenetic view that
your modern animal cells, and mine, ac¬
tually contain various fungi and other
atrey ding-a-llngs that slid into one of
our ancestors and found useful work, join¬
ing the basic genetic program.

It used to be fashionable to say,
"The brain ia a computer."

But now people say, "The brain
is a hologram."

It BfafJ

Almost nothing is known about the brain.

Oh, there are lots of picture-books showing
cross-sections of brains... Maybe you thought
it was just a big cauliflower, but it's full of
strings and straps and lumps and hardly any¬
thing ia known about any of it.

Clinical evidence, of course, tells us
that if this or that part is cut out, the patient
can't talk, or walk, or smell, or whatever.

But that doesn't come close to telling us how the
thing works when it does work. The histologists,
the perceptual psychologists, the anatomistB,
are all working at it— with no convergence.
Beautiful example: the split-brain stuff, which
I just better not even bring up here (see new
Maya Pines book, Harcourt Brace).

We used to dissect brains when I worked
down in Dr. Lilly'B dolphin lab. Dolphin brains
are about 1.2 times the size of ours, and Lilly
quite reasonably pointed out that this might mean
dolphins were smarter than us.

And. of course, the bigger whales even
smarter. We had a killer-whale brain in the
deepfreeze that was about 2i feet across . And
whales come much bigger than that; the Killer's
maybe a quarter the length of the Blue.

(I should point out here that Lilly’s pub¬
licity on the intelligence of dolphins was a little
too good: it somehow didn't get mentioned that
dolphins are just very small whales , the only
ones you can feasibly keep in a lab. So think
of whales as the possible super-smarties, not
just dolphins.}

What's that you say? That "brain size
isn't what counts"? That's an interesting point.

People with small heads are by and large
just as smart as people with big heads. That's
one argument.

However, people have much bigger brains
than almost any other animals. That indicates
something too.

I believe that the only other animals with
very big brains are elephants and whales. (An
anatomical explanation: the weight is supported
on the man by balancing it, on the elephant by
a heavy and comparatively inflexible neck offset
by a grappling tool, and in the whale by putting
it in the front of a torpedo. But most other
anatomies couldn't manage a big brain, so they
can’t evolve one.^

Anyhow, so the scientific question is
whether big-brained species are smart. Well,
dogs are smarter than rats. . .

But about these other guys in our league
and beyond. How do we know scientifically
that "the size of the brain isn't what counts"?
Because obviously they’re not as smart as we
are, people say. Therefore it isn't brain size
that counts. The depth of this logic should be
evident. (I've even heard people say, "Of course
they're not as smart. They don't have guns.")

Pay close attention to an elephant sometime.

Working elephants in India respond to some
500 different oral commands.

Can you think of a 501st thing to ask an
elephant to do? (I rather suppose it could oblige.)

Anyway, the dozen whales I've known per¬
sonally were smart as hell.

It used to be believed that memory was
exclusively a matter of synaptic connections--
the gradual closing of little switches between
nerve cells with practice.

It is now known that temporary or
short-term memory is synaptic, but something
else takes place after that. It's believed that
after a certain period, and it has something
to do with rest and sleep, memories are trans¬
ferred to some other form, presumably chemical.
But how?

My friend Andrew J. Singer has a beau¬
tiful hypothesis that wraps it up. His gueas
is that memories are moved from synaptic
storage to DNA (!) storage during dreaming ,
or more specifically REM sleep. I like that one.

WH^T NtXT?

By browsing this book you may have more
sense of what computers are doing, can do,
should do.

What will you do now?

By reading this book in some detail, es¬
pecially that difficult machine-language stuff (see
"Rock Bottom" and "Bucky’s Wristwatch," pp.

32)• or the pieces on specific computer
languages Cpp - >. you really should be

mentally prepared to get into programming, if
you dig it.

Maybe you should consider buying your
own minicomputer, for a couple of thousand. Or
(if you're a parent), chipping in with several
families to get one. Or a terminal, and buying
(or cadging as cadge can) time on a time-sharing
system. Maybe you should start a computer club,
which makes it easier to get cast-off equipment;
if you're kids, write the R.E.S.J.S.T.O.R.S. (p.
f7). If you have a chance, maybe you should
take computer courses, but remember the slant
these are likely to have. Or perhaps you prefer
just to sit and wait, and be prepared to speak up
sharply if the computer people arrive ready to
push you around. Remember:

COMPUTER POWER TO THE PEOPLE!

DOWN WITH CYBERCRUD!

Computers could do all kinds of things for
individuals , if only the programs were available.
For instance: help you calculate your tax inter¬
actively till it comes out best; help the harried
credit-card holder with bill-paying by allowing
him to try out different payments to different
creditors till he settles on the month's best mix,
then typing the checkB; WRITING ANGRY LETTERS
BACK to those companies that write you nasty
letters by computer; helping with letter-writing
in general. You’ll have to write the programs.

How do you think computers can help
the world?

What are you waiting for?

THE COPPER MAN WALKED OUT OF THE ROCKY CAVERN

Fashions change.

The ttlTiejr Ontora^?

The focus of attention in genetics and
organic chemistry has for a decade now been
the remarkable systems and structures of the
molecules of life, DNA and RNA.

DNA is the basic molecule of life, a long
and tiny strand of encoded information. Actually
it is a digital memory, a stored representation
of codes necessary to sustain, reproduce, and
even duplicate the creature around it.

It is literally and exactly a digital memory.

Its symbols are not binary but quaternary , as
each position contains one of four code molecules;
however, as it takes three molecules in a row to
make up one individual codon, or functioning
symbol, the actual number or possible symbols
is 64-- the number of possible combinations of
four~different symbols in a row of three. (I don't
know the adjective for sixtyfourishneBS, and it’s
just as well.)

The basic mechanism of the system was
worked out by Francis Crick and dames Watson,
who understandably got the Nobel Prize for it.

The problem was thia: how could living cells
transmit their overall plans to the cells they
split into? — and how could these plans be
carried out by a mechanical process?

The mechanism is astonishingly elegant.
Basically there is one long molecule, the DNA
molecule, which is really a long tape recording
of all the information required to perpetuate
the organism and reproduce it. This is a
long helix (or corkscrew), as Linus Pauling
had guessed years before. The chemical pro¬
cesses permit the helix to be duplicated, to
become two stitched-together corkscrews, and
then for them to come apart , unwinding to go
their separate ways to daughter cell6.

As a tape recording, the molecule directs
the creation of chemicals and other cells by an
intricate series of processes, not well understood.
Basically, though, the information on the basic
DNA tape is transferred to a new tape, an active
copy called "messenger RNA," which be¬
comes an actual playback device for the
creation of new molecules according to
the plan stored on the original.

Some things are known about this process
and some aren't, and I may have this wrong,
but basically the DNA-- and its converted copy,
the RNA-- contain plans for making all the
basic protein molecules of the body, and anything
else that can be made with amino acids. (Those
molecules of the body which are not proteins or
built of amino acids are later made in chemical
processes brought about by these kinds.)

Now well may you ask how this long tape
recording makes chemical molecules. The answer,
so far as is known, is extremely puzzling.

As already mentioned, the basic code
molecules (or nitrogenous bases ) are arranged
in groups of three. When the RNA is turned
on. these triples latch onto the molecules of
amino acid that happen to be floating by in the
aoupy interior of the cell. (There are twenty--
seven amino acids, and sixty-four possible
combinations of three bases; this is fine, because
several different codons of three bases can glom
onto the same passing amino acid.)

Now. the tape recording it divided into
separate sections or templates ; and each template
does its own thing. When a template is filled,
the string of amino acids in that section separate,
and the long chain that results is a particular
molecule of significance in some aspect of the
critter's life processes— often a grand long
thing that folds u|> in a certain way, exposing
only certain active surfaces to the ongoing
chemistry of the cell.

One theory about the mechanics of this is
that a sort of zipper slide, called the ribo some,
chugs down the tape, attaching the called-for
amino acida and peeling off the ever-longer result.

Now, here are some of the funny things
that are known about this. One is that there is
a particular codon of three bases that is a stop
code , just like a period in ordinary punctuation.
This signals the end of a template. Another ia
that the templates on the tape are in no partic¬
ular order , but distributed higgledy-piggledy.
(Geneticists engaged in mapping the genes of a
particular species of creature find that the gene
for eye color may turn out to be right next to
the gene for length of tail-- but where those
are really . and what the particular molecules do
that determine it, are still mysterious sorts of
question.)

Much pressing research in molecular bio¬
logy, then, is concerned with searching for
whatever it is that switches different things on
and off at different times in the careers of the
ever-splitting cells of our bodies. Not to men¬
tion those of all other living creatures, including
turnips.

COMPUTERISH CONJECTURES

The guy8 who specialize in this are usually
chemists, and presumably know what they're
doing, so the following remarks are not intended
as butting into chemistry. However, new per¬
spectives often give fresh insight; and the matters
we've covered so far might seem to have a cer¬
tain relevance.

DNA and RNA, as already remarked, may
without distortion be thought of as a tape . Indeed,
on this tape is a data structure, and indeed it is
a data structure which seems to be involved with
the execution of a program -- the program that
occurs as the organism's cells differentiate.

There is evidently some sort of program
follower which is capable of branching to dif¬
ferent selections of (or subprograms ) in the
overall program, depending on various factors
in the cell's environment-- or perhaps its age.

Now, it is one thing to look for the par¬
ticular chemical mechanisms that handle this.

That's fine. On the other hand, we can also
consider (from the top down) what sort of a
program follower it must be to behave like this.
(This is like the difference between tracing out
particular circuitry and trying to figure out
the structure of a program from how it behaves.)

Here is some more weird stuff about this.

Large sections of the DNA strand are "dark,"
it turns out, just meaningless stretches of random
combinations of bases that don’t mean anything—
or ever get used. This ties in, of course, with
the notion that genetic change is random and
blind; the general supposition is that genetic
mutation takes place a base or two at a time,
and then something else activates a chance com¬
bination in a dry stretch that turns out to be
useful, and this is somehow perfected through
successive 1-base changes during the process
of successive mutation and evolution.

Amazing use is made of these mechanisms
by some viruses. Now, viruses are often thought
of as the most basic form of life, but actually
they are usually dependent on some other form
and hence more streamlined than elemental. Well,
some viruses (but not all) have the capacity for
inserting themselves in the genetic material:
breezing up to the DNA or RNA. unhooking it in
a certain place and lying down there, then being
duplicated as part of th£ template , then unhooking
themselves and toddling away-- both parent virus
and copy. I can’t for the life of me think of an
analogy to this, but I keep visualizing it as hap¬
pening somehow in a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

CONTROL MECHANISMS

Now, all cells are not alike. From the first
beginning cell of the organism (the zygote), various
splits create more and more specialized, differ¬
entiated cells. A liver cell is extremely different
from a brain cell, but they both date back by
successive splitting from that first zygote. Yet
they have different structures and manufacture
different chemicals.

One simplification may be possible: the
"structure" of a cell may really be its chemical
composition, since cell walls and other struc¬
tures are thought to be special knittings of
certain tricky molecules. Okay, so that may
reduce the question slightly. How then does
the cell change from being an Original (undif¬
ferentiated, zygotic) cell to the Specialized
cells that manufacture particular other complex
chemicals?

One hypothesis was that these other cells
have different plans in them, different tapes.

But this theory was discarded when John Gurdon
at Oxford produced a fresh frog zygote from the
intestinal cell of a frog (which accordingly, in
due time, became a frog de facto ). This proved,
most think, that the whole tape is in every cell.

Thua there must be something-or-other
that blocks the different templates at different
times (You there, now you're a full-fledged epi¬
thelial cell, never mind what you did before)
and selects among all the subprograms on the tape.

At any rate, the following interesting con¬
jectures arise:

1. The mechanism of somatic reproduction is

a subroutining p rogram follower— not unlike
the second program follower of the subroutining
display (see p. That is, it steps very

slowly through a master program somewhere,
and with each new step directs the blocking or
unblocking of particular stretches of the tape.

As the program is in each cell, presumably
it is being separately followed in each cell.

(This is sometimes called distributed computing .)

2. In each cell, the master program is direc¬
ting certain tests , whose results may or may not
command program branching- - successive steps
to new states of the overall program. It may

be testing for particular chemical secretions in
its environment; it could even be testing a counter .

3. (This is the steep one.) If this were so,

we might suppose that this program too was stored
on the DNA, in one or more program areas; and
it would therefore be necessary to postulate some
addressing mechanism by which the program fol¬
lower can find the templates to open and close.

(And perhaps further sections of the program.)

4. Indeed, it makes sense to suppose that
such a program has the form of a dispatch table
--a list of addresses In the tape, perhaps asso¬
ciated with specifications of the tests which a're
to cause the branching.

(or

These wild speculations are offered in the
spirit of interdisciplinary good fellowship and
good clean fun. Whether (1) and (2) have any
actual content, or are merely paraphrases of
what Is already known or disproven, I don’t
know; somebody may find the rest suggestive.

Two more observations, though. These
are not particularly deep, and may indeed be
obvious, but they suggest an approach.

5. There ia definitely a Program Restart; to wit,
whatever it ia that turns an old differentiated
intestine cell into a fresh zygote.

6. Cancer is a runaway subroutine.

Tha above remarks aeea to be obsolete. The genetic mechanise really lent to be a Hat processor (see p.
using anocUtlvt, rather than numerical addressing. Th* gene Is now thought to be divided into four segments,
fn . kyi- called Promoter, Initiator, gene proper, end Terminator. As I understand

SJ' It, the promoter and terminator sonee contain codas which mean, simply,

J ' I Start and Stop. The Initiator zone, however, la a coded segment which ef-

* fsctivel yflabela the gene. This Initiator area contains a chemical code uni¬

que for every gene. Ae suggested In the above article, we may consider both Its logical structure— Its mech-
anlsas and effacts, considered from a computerssn'■ point of view-- and its chemical structure, or what is
raally happening. The genes ere turned off by grabbing molecules, or repressors , which glom onto the initiator^—+)
sect Ions of the genes which they have bean specifically coded to repress. Research In this area must now find " '

the specific coding of molecules which block and unblock specific genes, and how these fit In the overall graph
of metabolism, immunology, development, and ao on. If there la anything to make an old atheist uneasy, it la
tha extraordinary beauty of thia clockwork.

BIBLIOGRAPHY (f>T

Har Gobind Khorana, Willard Gibbs lecture. May 1974 ,
"Progress in the Total Synthesis of the p-ro-
sina tmtAGene and Its Control Elements."

4 f^VlWSLY

Not all kid* who play with computara irt
quit* a* law-abiding aa tha R.E .8.1.S .T.O.R.S.
And tha temptation* ara vary alronf.

On# auch youngster want on a Mghaehool
fUld-trlp to a auburhan Philadelphia polio#
atalion. and aaw a demonatratlon of the polio#
ramota Information ayatem

Tha polio# who war* demonatrating it,
not being oomputar fraake, didn't reallaa how
simple it waa to obaerva th# dial-in number#,
paaaword* and protocol.

Whan thia lad got home, he merrily went
to hi* computer terminal in the baaement and
proceeded to enter Into Philadelphia'a liai of
moat-wanted criminal* th* name* of all hi*

A few day* later a man came to hla houae
from th# FBI. He waa evidently not a regular
operative but a technical type. He aaked very
nicely If the boy had a terminal. Then the FBI
man aaked very nicely If he had put in thaae
name*. The boy edmltted. grinning, that he
had (Everyone In the aohool knew it had to
be he.)

"Of courae it didn't do any harm.” aaya
tha culprit. "I had them down for crimes UXe
'intellectual murder.' What could happen to them

PHILADELPHIANS AND CROOKS PLEASE NOTE:

Thia happened five or all year* ago, and
without a doubt the ayatem la by now totally eecut
and impenetrable. Let'ahope.

louseHf Redoes ••

Atyse ih foiMT

The question of "privacy” in the aba tract
ian't really an laaue. Who carea if Cod aeea
under your clothe*’ Th* problem 1* what hap¬
pen* to you on the beat* of people'* acceaa to
your record*.

M>. St. Jamee i* a celebrated weal coast
proatltuta, once well known for her activities
with Paul Kraaaner as "The Realist Nun;” she
la now Chalt-madam of an organisation called
COYOTE, campaigning for the decriminalization
of prostitution.

She originally had no intention of becom¬
ing a prostitute. Rather, she learned that
there waa a false record of her arrest for pros¬
titution; and despite her efforts to dear her
name, the record followed her wherever she
tried to get a job. Finally she said the hall
with It and did become a prostitute.

SLACt

hHV h$j> ml eve*.

The phone eyetem is bruised and bleeding
from the depredations of people who hive found
out how to cheat the phone company electronical¬
ly. Such people are called Phone Freaks (or
Phreax): articles on them have appeared in auch
place* aa Rampart* . The Realist and Out. For
no clear reason, the electronic devices they use
have been given various colorful names:

blkck box: device which. attached to a

local telephone, permits It to receive
an incoming call without billing the
calling party; it "look* like” the
phone is still ringing, as far aa the
billing mechanism la concerned.

b |ua box; device that generate* the magical
"inside" lone* that open up the phone
network and atop the billing median-
iam. Pose**Ion of a blue box can
put you in prison .

Aa with ao many things, th*
phone ayatem waa not dealgned under
the aaaumption that there would be
tbouaanda af electronic wlae-guy*
capable of fooling around with tl.
Thu* the phone system is tragically
vulnerable to such meaalng around.
The only thing they can do 1# gat
ferocious laws paaaed and really try
to catch people, both of which are
apparently happening. Buppoaediy
It la lilagal to possess a ton# gener¬
ator. or to inform anyone aa to what
th* magical frequencies are-- even
though a slid* whistle t* auch a
tone generator, and any engineering

rml box: device that simulate* the signals
mad* by falling coins.

Th# fact that th* name* of these davlcwe
•re given her* is not lo be construed a* In any
aenae approving of tham. and anybody who
me**** around with them la a fool, playing with
napalm.

Evan if people were entitled to steal beck
profit* from th* phone oompany - - the
•o-called "people's discount"-- tha trouble I*
that they meaa thing* up for evaryon*. W* have
a beautiful and deUcata phone ayatem, on* that
•tend* reedy to do wonderful things for you.
Including bring uompular aervlc# to your home;
even if. for th* sake of argument. It la run by
dirty rata, massing around with It la Ilk* poi¬
soning tha reservoir for everybody.

■bUTA "

The term "data bank" doesn't have
any particular technical weaning, rt
Just refers to any large store of infor¬
mation, especially something attached to
a computer.

For instance, at Dartmouth College,
where the social scientists have been
working hand-in-hand with their big tine-
sharing project, an awesone anount of data
is already available on-line in the social
sciences. The last census, for instance,
in detailed and undigested fora, Suppose
you're at Dartnouth and you get into an
argument over whether, say, divorced women
earn as much on the average as women the
sane age who havd never been married.

To solve; you just go to the nearest terminal,
bat in a quick program in BASIC, and the
system actually re-analyzes the census data
to answer your question. If only Congress
had this!

Because of the way census data is hand¬
led, now, it is not possible to ask for the
records of a specific individual. But this
kind of capability leads to some real dangers

There is a lot of information stored
about most individuals in this country.

Credit information, arrest records, medical
and psychiatric files, drivers' licenses,
military service records, and so on.

Now, it is not hard to find out about
an individual. A few phone calls from an
official-50unding person can ascertain his
credit rating, for instance. But that is
very different from putting all these re¬
cords together in one place.

The potential for mischief lies in
danger to individuals. Persons up to no
good could carefully investigate someone
through the computer and then burglarize
or kidnap. Someone unscrupulous could
look for rich widows with 30-year-old un¬
married daughters. Organized crime could
search for patsies and strong-arm victims.

In the face of this sort of possi¬
bility, computer people have been worry¬
ing for years; noteworthy is the study
by Alan Westin that originally sounded
the alarm, and his too-reassuring follow¬
up study of some data-gathering organ¬
izations (see bibliography). But the
scary data banks, the ones that evidently
keep track of political dissenters,
aren't talking about what they do (see
Schwartz piece).

Basically, the two greatest dangers
from data banks are organized crime and
the Executive branch of the Federal Gov¬
ernment-- assuming there is still a dis¬
tinction. -

"And th# rocket'# red glare,

D«e bomb# bunting in air,

Oaoe proof through the night
That our flag one at ill than*.

had had control ovi
national data bank:
Enough said.

he is concerned about computers and the
privacy problem. Cynics may joke about
what his concern actually is; but a more
credible stand was taken by vice-presi¬
dent Ford at the 1974 National Computer
Conference. Ford expressed personal
concern over privacy, particularly consid¬
ering a proposed system called FEDNET,
which would supposedly centralize govern¬
ment records of a broad variety.

Not mentioned by Ford was the matter
of NCIC, the National Crime Information
Center. This will be a system, run by
the FBI, to give police anywhere in the
country access to centralized records.

THE QUESTION IS WHAT GETS STORED. Ar¬
rest records? Anonymous tips? (It would
be possible to frame individuals rather
nicely if a lot of loose stuff could be
slipped into the file.)

Many people seen to be concerned
with preserving some "right to privacy,"
which is certainly a very nice idea, but
it isn't in the Constitution; getting
such a "right" formalized and agreed upon
is going to be no small matter.

But that isn't what bothers me.
Considering recent events, and the char¬
acter of certain elected officials whole
devotion to, and conception of, democracy
is lately in doubt, things' are scarcely
as abstract as all that. Considering how
helpful our government has been to brutal
regimes abroad-- notably the Chile over¬
throw, which some say was run from here
(and which used sports arenas for deten¬
tion just as John Hitchell did--) we can
no longer know what use any information
may find in this government. Tomorrow's
Data Bank may be next week's Enemies List,
next month's Protective Custodial Advis¬
ory-- and next year’s Termination List.

(I don't know if you saw Robert Hardian's
eyes on the Watergate hearings, but they
chilled my blood.)

Ita name ha* kapt changing, possibly
to lull th# public, possibly to gull th*
Congrass. Anyhow, would you believe a
system, totally controlled by ccwputers,
dealgned to shoot down oncoming mlaallaa?
If you would, read on.

It'* been called Nike-X, Safeguard
and goodnaa* knows what. lit'* even bean
called a "thin ahleld"— masculine, huh?
Perhaps Congress would pay more if they
called it th* Trojan 4X.) But generally
w* refer to It a* the ABK {Antl-Balliatic

tractor. They're th* mar
of the telephone company.

Of the hundredi of milltor
they ere taking in on thl

r H. David, "Computers. Privacy, and Sacu-
ttj •" Computer Declelona , Hay 7*. 46-A8.

. Wsetin, Privacy and Freedom . 1947.

cord-tMpm, and Prlv

■ landmark study of Compute
Completed.” CACM, De

which make* the computer*
which guide* th* project,
Whippany, N.J. facility 1

drawing only on Information that 1* pub¬
licly available, and drawing conclusion*
from It th* way on* usually draw* conclu-

Tha radar latagea axe forever con¬
stantly analysed ly coaqjuter*. using
avary trick of Pattern Recognition (*e

p. D*l'2ri-

Yea, ye*. I’m quit# sure now, aaya

phallic shape axlaee. It haa jagged an¬
gular fins, inherited from the smaller
antl-eircraft Hike (we say Hikay) rockets
that preceded It. Thia missile la celled
tha Spartan.

ir system la tracking tha

is Spartan la turning,

1 faster— they're coming

Oncoming missile speedi maybe 15,000
mil** an hour. Spartan speed> maybe
10,000, who know*. In the** few minute*
the Spartan ha* gone *00 miles.

the attacking missile, the hope 1
the attacking mlaalla'e tharmonuc
warhead will gat heated on one el

just breaks a few buildings and a

realise that tha bad guy has gotta
through, up goes Sprint: Sprint i
quently celled tha "terminal dafan
system." it only ha* a couple of

d thl* description alnd-
* because It la. Anybody
at thia project, on which
r dollars haw* already

Evan if missile* atayad Ilka they
were in the good old days of 1942 , big
helpless clunker# they had to fuel up
just before th* ahoot, th# likelihood of
th* 5-mil# AM detonation they count on
was pretty low. (Supposedly ARPA waa
hoping that Spartan and Sprint could be
replaced with ultrapower, fry-in-the-sky
laser beam*, rapping down all caawre

But even given, and only for th*
eak* of argument, the feasibility of
Spartan-Sprint for flsh-ln-a-barrel
ehota, look what's happening now.

HIHV (Multiple Independently Tar¬
geted Re-entry Vehicle) basically means
Multiple Warheads. On* rocket can carry
all these little guys, see, that fan out
when it gat* near the target, and each
on* goes to its own target city or instal
latlon. ros, or Fractional Orbital he-
bardment system, juat means that they
send the thing into an orbit around the
world, and tb* warheads comm in from the
opposite aid*. An£ side. Meaning that
all those radars pointed *t Russia would
make good drive-in movie screens.

one wonders how such things could ever
be funded. But then again I remember
once hearing Eric Sevareld, whom some
call a liberal, pontificate on this sub¬
ject. “They describe it aa a 'thin
shield,'(he said) Why can't wa just
spend a few billion more and get collate
protection?" otherwise canny people, if
fooled by the technologists, will believe
anything.

"Garfield, our people in Operat

11, I guess It would have to be..."
ae aa Vietnam. "Gee whir, they say to
arch and destroy, I guess that aaut
an..." Something new, this, the top-
en project of th# worst sort, where
b orders go down, and only news of

Th# sophisticated argument la that
the ABM effort lets our nation "keep ita
hand In," "sharpen skill*,’ in case some¬
thing vaguely like this la ever really
needed— and possible. But thl* overlooks
the overall strategic problM. All this
foolishness lead* away (icm the stability
of tha daterrene> and that may be what
kaapa everybody alive.

Hay II, 120-12*.

■polar System* end th* tseua of
v Par Away la 191*1" Deiamet loo . KtTL, ^t).

la an Imposing term which means almost anything.
Basically, "simulation" means any activity that
represents or resembles something Computer
simulation is using the computer to mimic some¬
thing real, or something that might be. tor any
purpose; to underetand an ongoing process battar,
or to see how something might come out in the

Hero again. though. the Science myth etepa
in to mystify this proceaa, as though the mere
uee of the computer conferred validity or some
kind of truth.

(On TV allows the Space Voyagers stand
In front of the "computer" and ask in firm, unnat¬
urally loud voices whit will be the results of so-
and-so. The computer's oracular reply ie infal¬
lible. On TV.)

Let there be no mystery about this. Any
use of a data structure on a what-if basis la
Simulation. You can simulate In detail or crudely;
your simulation can embody any theories, sensible
or stupid; and your results may or may not cor¬
respond to reality .

A "computer prediction" Is the outcome of
a simulation that someone, evidently, is willing
to stand behind. (Bee "computer election predic¬
tions." p. 6C.)

These polnte have to be etreased because
If there is one computer activity which la preten¬
tiously presented and streased, it ia simulation.
Especially to naive clients. There is nothing
wrong with simulation but there is nothing super¬
natural about it either.

Another term which means more or less
the same ia modelling .

In the loose sense, simulation or model¬
ling consists of calculstions sboul any dea-
crtbable phoenomena-- for instance, optical
equations. In optica] modelling (and this Is how
they design today's great lenses), a data struc¬
ture ia created which represent* the curvature,
mounting, etc. of the separate glasses In a lens.
Then "simulating" the patha of individual rays
of light through that lens, the computer program
teats that lens design for how well Ihe ray#
come together, and ao on. Then the design ia
changed and tried again.

Another type of simulation, an important
and quite diatinct one-- la that which represent*

Ihe complex Interplay of myriad units, finding
out the upshots and consequences of intricate
premises. In traffic simulations, for Instance,

II ia easy enough to represent thousands of cars
in a data structure, and have them "react"
like driver*-- creating very convincing traffic
Jams, again represented somehow within the
data structure.

Basically simulation requires two things;
a representation. or data structure, that somehow
represents the things you're simulating in the
aspects that concern you; and then a program
does something to these data, that is in some
way like the process you're concerned about
acting on the things you're modelling. And each
event of significance enacted by the program
must somehow leave its trice in the data structure.

The line between simulation and other pro¬
gramming ia not alwaya clear. Thu# the calcu¬
lation of the future orbits of the planets could be
called "simulations."

The moat intricate ceaea, though, don’t
particularly reaemble any other kinds of programs.
The intricate enactments of physical movements,
especially swarms and myriads with mixed and
colliding populations, are especially Interesting.

On a recent Scientific American article, alrnula-
tion helped to understand possible streamers
of stars between gslaxies as resulting from nor¬
mal considerations of Inertia and gravitation.

CAUr and Juri Toomre. "Violent Tides between
Gslaxies,’ Sri. Am. Dec 73, 38-48.))

Models of complex end changing rates are
another Interesting type. Enectlng complex
thing*, whose amount* are constantly changing
In term* of percentage multiplier* of each other,
•ound easy in principle, but their consequences
can be quite aurprlaing. (See "The Club of
Rome," p. 4f .)

To Imagine the kinds of mixed-case myriad
modal* now possible, we could on today's big
computers model entire societies, with a separata
record describing each Idlvldual out of million*,
and specifying hla probebilities of action and
different preference* according to various theories
then follow through whole societies' behavior
in terras of education, income, marriage, sex
poverty, death, and anything else. Talk about
tin soldier* and boats In the bathtub.

Any computer language can be used for
some kind of simulation. For simulations Invol¬
ving relatively few entitlee, but lota of rates
or formulas, good old BASIC or FORTRAN la
One (MAOl'a "SynthaVision" eyatem, which
could be said to "elmulste" complex figures In
a three dimensional epees, U done in Portren;

P-5*C*.> for simulations involving a lot
of separate objects, special cases end diecreta
events. TRAC Language (see p. | J ) ia great.

U numerous mathematical formulas are involved,
and you want to change them around consider¬
ably til an experimental eon of way. APL ie
well suited (see pp 22, ) ■

There are * number of special "simulation"
language*, notably SIM SCRIPT and ops 8 The*#

have additional faaturea useful, lor instance. In
simulating event# over time, such aa "EVENT"
oommand* which synchronise or drsw division-
tine* in time (the simulated time). Simulation
language# generally allow a great variety of
data type* and operations on them.

The list -processing fanatic*, of course,
insist that thalr own languages (such aa LISP
and SNOBOL) are best And then there's PLATO
lea* P^Zfc). whoas TUTOH language is eplen-
did for both formulae and dlscrat# work-- but
allow, you only 1S00 variables, total (to bits

Tha thing I*, any ael o( assumptions, no
matter how Intricate, can be enacted by a compu¬
ter model. Anything you can express exactly
can be carred out. and you can aee Ita conse¬
quence* In the computer's readout-- a printout,
a screen display. or some other view into the
resulting date structure.

Obvloualy theee enactments (or sometime*
"prediction*") are wholly fallible, deriving any
validity they may have from the soundness of
the Initial data or model.

However, they have another important
function, one which la going to be very impor¬
tant In education and. I hope, general public
understanding, >■ computers get spread about
more widely and become more usable.

The availability of simulation models can
make thing# easier to understand. Well-set-up
simulation programs, available easily through
terminals, can be used as Staged Explanatory
Structures and Theoretical Exploration Tools.

The user can build hi* own wars, his own so¬
cieties, his own economic conditions, and aee
what follow* from the ways he sets them up.
Importantly, different theories can be applied to
tha same setups, to make more vivid the conse¬
quences of one or the other point of view.

(Indeed, similar facilities ought to be avail¬
able for Congress, to allow them to pour a new
tax through the population and see who suffers.
who gains. ..)

1 should point out here that tor this pur¬
pose-- Insightful Simulation-- you don't alwaya
need a computer. I have in mind the so-called
"simulation games." which If well designed give
extraordinary insights to the players. Allen
Calhamer's brilliant game of Diplomacy, for in¬
stance (Games Research, Boston; available from
Brentano's. NYC) teaches more about Internationa]
politics than you could suppose possible. 1 am
also intrigued by a game called "Stmsoc," worked
out by a sociologist to demonstrate the develop¬
ment of aocia) structures from a state of random
creation, but I haven’t played It. (Clark C.

Abt, of Abt Associates, Boston, has also done
s lol of Interesting design here.)

A last point, s very "practical" application.
Simulation makes it poaslble to enact thinga with¬
out trying them out in concrete reality. For in-
atance, in the lens-design systems mentioned
earlier. Ihe lenses don't have to be actually built
to find out their detailed characteristics. Nor
ia it necessary to build electronic circuitry, now.
to find out whether it will work-* at least that'a
what the salesmen say. You can simulate any
circuit from a terminal, and "measure" what it
does at any time or In any part with simulated
meters. Similarly, when any computer ia des¬
igned now, it's simulated before it's built, and
programs are run on the simulated computer,
aa enacted within a rest computer, to see if it
behaves os Intended. (Actually there are some
hot-wire types who insist on building things
first, but one assumes that the more aensible
computer designers do this.)

With automobiles it's harder; but GM, for
instance, aimulates the handling characteristics
of its cars before they're ever built-- so that
designers can redistribute weight, change steer¬
ing characteristics and so on, till the handling
chsracteritatlca come out Ihe way the Consumers
seem to like.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Simulation magazine is the official journal of

Simulation Councils, Inc., the curiously-
named society of the Simulators. It costa
$18 a year from Simulation Councils. Inc..
Box 2228, La Jolla CA 82037.

ora^T'ONs

la an extension of Simulation In a fairly obvious
direction.

If simulation means the Enactment of some
event by computer. Operations Research means
doing these enactments to try out different strat¬
egies, and test the most effective ones.

Operations research really began during
World Wsr II with such problems as submarine
hunting. Given so-and-so many planes, whit
pattern should they fly in to make their catching
submarines most likely? Building from certain
types of known probability, (but in areas where
"true" mathematical answers were not easily
found), operations researchers could sometimes
find the beet ("optimal”) strategies tor many
different kinds of activity.

Basically what they do is play the situation
out hundreds or thousands of times, enacting it
by computer, and using dice-throwing techniques
(o determine the outcomes of all the unpredictable
parts. Then, after all entities have done their
thing, the program can report on what strategies
turned out to be most effective.

Example . In 1973 the Saturday Review of
aomethlng-or-other printed a piece on the solu¬
tion . by OR techniques, of the game of Monopoly.
Effectively the game had been played thousands of
times, the dice thrown perhaps millions, and
the different "players" had employed various
different strategies against each other In a varying
mix: Alwaya Buy, Buy Light Green. Utilities and
Boardwalk, etc.

A complete solution was found, the strategy
which tends (over many plays) to work beat. I
forget what it was.

Using another technique, the game of foot¬
ball was analyzed by Robert E. Macho) of North¬
western and Virgil Carter, a football personage.
Their ides was to teat various maxims of the
game, to find out which common rules about
beneficial plays were true. What they did was
replay fifty-six blg-lcaguc football games on a
play-by-play basis, rate the outcomes, and see
which circumstances proved most advantageous on
the average. I’ve mislaid the reprint ( Operations
Research , a recent year), and being totally ig¬
norant of football can remember none of the find¬
ings. Anyhow, that's where to look. (CM** f**'*,

The earlier explanation of Operation a
Research wasn’t quite right. It's any systematic
study of whnl works best. Computers can help.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Irvin R. Hemzel, "How to Win at Monopoly."

Saturday Review of Science ■ Apr 73, 44-8.

Virgil Carter and Robert E. Machol, "Operations

Research on Football." Operations Research .
March 1971, 541-544.

GM ISSUES

For all I know you get annual mem¬
bership free with thet. I've alweya wanted
to join bul It was alwaya the one thing too
many; but their conference programs are
seneatlonal. Where else can you hear
papers on traffic, biology, military hardware,
weather prediction and electronic deeign
without changing your seal?

Until now, the obscurity of computers
has kept the public from understanding
that anything like political issues were
involved in their use. But now a lot of
things are going to break. For instance—

y^y^y^y^y^y^y^y^y

ws mr

"Simulation" means almost anything that in
any way represents or resemble* something.

Which la not to aay it's a useless or improper
term. Just a slippery one.

Ex imp lee . Here are weya we could "simu¬
late" a horse race:

Show dots moving around an oval track
on a completely random basis, and declare the
Aral to complete the circuit The Winner.

Assign odds to Indivldusl horses, and
then uee a randomizer to choose Ihe winner,
taking Into account those odds. (This is how the
PLATO "horserace" game works; see .)

Give conditional odds lo Ihe different horses,
baaed on possible "weather condition*." Than
flip a ooln (or the computer equivalent, weighted
randomisation) to tael the "weather conditions,”
and assign the hors*'* performance accordingly.

Program an enactment of a hors* race, in
which tha winner la salaried on Ihe baaia of
tha Interaction of tha horoscope* of horae and
rider.

Create a data structure representing the
three-dlmanatonal hinging of horae'e bones, and
th* interlaced timing of th* tha horae'* gait.

(This has bean duns at U. of Pennsylvania on a
DEC Stl.) Then have these stick figure* run
around * track (or tha data structure equivalent).

Using a synthetic photography system
such a* MAUI's Synthaviaion (see p.yt5i>. create
the ID date structure for th* entire surface or a
running horse over Ume; then make several copies
of this horse run around a track, and make aim
ulsted photograph* of it.

And ao on.

So don't be snowed by the torn “simulation "
** meena much, little or nothing, depending.

foWTHet TH* FBI?

J. Edgar Hoover's recent death
raised a very serious problem. What
about all those files he had been keep¬
ing? Responsible critics of the FBI,
such as Fred J. Cook, have claimed t.iat
Hoover's policy basically consisted of
chasing lone punks (like Dillinger,
Bonnie and Clyde), harassing political
dissenters, and keeping vast unnecessary
records on innocent citlxens-- thus vir¬
tually creating the vast network of or¬
gan! zed - crliiiein America, which stays
off the police blotters. Thus the ques¬
tion of the FBI Succession was an impor-

The question has been answered. In
July 1973 Nixon appointed Clarence Kelley,
police chief of Kansas City. After the
previous goings-on*- for instance, Nixon's
seeming to offer the post to Judge Byrne
while he was presiding over the Ellsberg
trial-- this looked to the press like a
staid and uncontroversial resolution.

But was itT

Kelley certainly is aware of tech¬
nology. It seows to be he that put dis¬
play screens in Kansas City police cars,
crested the ALERT system (Automated Law
Enforcement Response Team) and COPPS
(Computerized Police Planning System),
which for your amusement ties into MULES
(Missouri Uniform Law Enforcement System).
(See Melvin F. Bockelman, ''On-Line C**»-
puters Keeping Things Straight," which
describes the Kansas City computer setup.
Communications . June 73, 12-20.) in a
more threatening vein, supposedly the
Kansas City department kept computer
files on "militants, mentals and acti¬
vists." (Schwartz article, p. 19.)

What Kelley does is thus of interest
to us all. The big question is whether,
for all his concern with police automation,
he is also concerned with the freedoms
this country used to be about.

'Necessity has been the excuse for

EVERY INFRINGEMENT OF HUMAN FREEDOM.
IT IS THE ARGUMENT OF TYRANTS)

IT IS THE CREED OF SLAVES.

Edmund Burke

OF Co^PUTE^f

purer as "rigid" (see "The Myth of the"
Computer," p. ), and partly because
the military use so many of them.

But it's not the nature of a com¬
puter, any more than the nature of b
typewriter is to type poems or death
warrants.

n cnange, and Congress buys it for them,

No way is there room to cover this
subject decently. But we'll mention a
few things.

The Pentagon, first of all, with its
payroll of millions, with its stupendous
inventories of blankets and bombs and
toilet paper, was the prime mover behind
the development of the Cobol business
computing language. So a vast amount is
spent just on computers to run the mili¬
tary establishment from a business point

Of course that's not the interesting
stuff. *

The really interesting stuff in com¬
puters all cane' out of the military.

The Department of Defense has a branch
called ARPA, or Advanced Research and
Development Agency, which finances all
kinds of technical developments with
vaguely military possibilities.

It is thus a supreme irony that ARPA
paid for the development of: COMPUTER
DISPLAY (the Sketchpad studies *(. Lincoln
Labs; see p.^R\E>); TIME-SHARING (e.g.
the CTSS system, see p. fT); HALFTONE
IMAGE SYNTHESIS (the Utah algorithms; but
see all of pp. "St - 31 ); and lots

more. Some folks might say that proves
it’s all evil. 1 say let’s look at cases.
While they have military applications,
that's simply because they have appli¬
cations in every field, and the military
are just where the money is.

Just to enumerate a few more mili¬
tary things--

Command and control -- the problem
of keeping track ol who's done what to
whom, and what's left on both sides,

*M * r 4»s» rv—“jj 1 '-

It is a solemn irony that the great
"465L Command and Control System"-- a
grand room with many projectors driven
by computer, only something like those
in "Dr. Strangclove" and “Fail-Safe"--
may be a prototype for offices and con¬
ference rooms of the future.

“Avionics"-- all the electronic
gadgets in airplanes, including those
for navigation. (A recent magazine
piece described how wonderful it felt
to fly the F-111-- which has a computer
managing the Feel of the Controls for
you.)

"Tactical systems"-- computers to
anage battlefield problems, aim guns
id missiles, scramble your voice a*ong
■rinue air freauen " '*

"Intelligence"-- computers are used
to colleto information coming in from
various sources. This is no simple prob¬
lem-- how to find out what is so from a
tangle of contradictory information;
think about It. Don't think about how
we get that information.

doubt being applied to the immense quan¬
tities of satellite pictures thet como
back. (Did you know our Big Bird satel¬
lite either chirps back its pictures by
radio, or parachutes them as Droppings?)

Of course, the joker is thet all
this obsession with gadgets does not
seem to have helped us militarily at all.
The army seems demoralized, and the navjr
losing ground to a country that hardly
even has computers,
guis currcoixr, hukt

Boston welfare recipient# have been
systematically abort-changed for at laaat
14 year#, according to Comtarworld 110
Oct 7J, p. 2).

a aystasu analyst recently dlacoverad
that tha welfare program waa not calcul¬
ating coet-of-living Increases on a «**-
pound baele, aa it should have bean, but
aa a alalia Increase baaed each year on
an obeolsta original figure.

Mowerer, It’s too lata to ask tor
ref unde, and anyway not many welfare re¬
cipients taka Camputaruorld .

iu (Wv BkV

DEC

TVt ?I)peo|>k

The computer companies are often referred
to in the field as "Snow White and the Seven
Dwarfs"-- a phrase that stays the same even as
the lesser ones (like RCA and General Electric)
get out of the business one by one. The phrase
suggests that they’re all alike. To an extent;
but there is one company sufficiently different,
and important enough both in its history and its
continuing eminence, to require exposition here.
This is Digital Equipment Corporation, usually
pronounced "Deck," the people who first brought
out the minicomputer and continue to make fine
stuff for people who know what they are doing.

Other computer companies have mimicked
IBM. They have built big computers and tried
to sell them to big corporations for their business
data proceaslng, or big "scientific” machines and
tried to sell them to scientists.

DEC went about it differently, always de¬
signing for the people who knew what they were
doing, and always going to great lengths to tell
you exactly what their equipment did.

First they made circuits for people who
wanted to tie digital equipment together. Then,
since they had the circuits anyway, they manu¬
factured a computer (the PDP-1). Then more
computers, increasing the line slowly, but always
telling potential users as much as they could
possibly want to know.

The same for its manuals. People who
wrote for information from Digital would often
get. not s summary sheet referring you to a local
sales offtce. but a complete manual (say. for
the PDF-8), including chapters on programming,
how to build interfaces to it, and the exact
timing and distribution of main internal pulses .
The effect of this was that sophisticated users--
especially in universities and research estab¬
lishments-- started building their own. Their
own interfaces, their own modifications to DEC
computers, their own original systems around
DEC computers.

Digital Equipment Corporation, in response
to the "Energy Crisis" of 1973, didn’t turn out

thsir Christmas tree. Instead they hooked it up 57

to a water wheel they happened to have. Typical.

This policy has made for slow but steady
growth. In effect, Digital built a national cus¬
tomer base among the most sophisticated clients.
The kids who as undergraduates and hmngers-on
built interfaces and kludgey arrangements, now
as project heads build big fancy systems around
DEC equipment. The places that know computers
usually have a variety of DEC equipment around,
usually drastically modified.

Because of the great success of its small
computers, especially the PDP 8, even many com¬
puter people think they only make small compu¬
ter. In fact their big computer, the PDP-10, is
one of the most successful time-sharing computers.
An example of its general esteem in the field: it
is the ho6t computer of ARPANET, the national
computer network among scientific installations
funded by the Department of Defense; basically
this means ARPANET is e network of PDP-lOs.

DEC'S computers have always been designed
by programmers, for programmers. This made
for considerable suspense when the PDP-11 did
not appear, even though the higher numbers did,
and the grapevine had il that the 11 would be
a sixteen-bit machine. It proved to be well
waiting for (see p. 22.). and has since become
the standard sophisticated 16-bi» machine in the
industry.

An area DEC has emphasized from the first
has been computer display (discussed at length
on the flip side). Thus it is no surprise that
their interactive animated computer display, the
GT40 (see p.Sty) is an outstanding design and
success. (And - the University of Utah, currently
the mother church of computer display, runs its
graphic systems from PDP-10s.)

In this plucky, homespun company, where
even president Olsen is known by his first name
(Ken), it is understandable that marketing pizazz
takes a back seat. This apparently was the view
of a group of rebels, led by vice president Ed
deCastro, who broke off in the late sixties to
start a new computer company around a 16-bit
computer design called the Nova-- rumored to
have been a rejected design for ihe PDP-11. The
company they started, Date General, has not been
afraid to use the hard sell, and between their
hard sell and sound machine line they’ve seriously
challenged Ihe parent company.

But Digital marches on, the Cor-puter Fur's
computer company. If IBM is computcrdcm’s
Kodak, whose overpriced but quite reliable goods
have various drawbacks, DEC is Nikon, with u
mix-and-match assortment of what the hotshots
want. That's pluralism for you.

PDP-1
(18 bits)

KM«W V0UI>

(There were no PDP-2, 3 or 13.)

ULTisifb??

DtC'j "awe (or*

I'm not getting any favors from DEC, I’m
just saying about them what people ought to
know.

However. I do have grateful recollections
of ihe warmth and courtesy with which people
from Digital Equipment Corporation have taken
pains to explain things to me. hour after hour,
conference after conference.

In the early sixties they had one man in
one small office to service and sell all of New
Jersey and New York City. Bui that one guy,
Dave Denniston. spent considerable time respon¬
ding to my questions and requests over a period
of a couple of years, and in the nicest possible
way. even though there was no way I could buy
anything. You don't forget treatment like that.

poynmes fcKwitMi

Some kinds of peripheral devices, or com¬
puter accessories, arc always necessary. Only
through peripherals can you look at or hear
results of what the computer does, store quan¬
tities of information, print stuff out and
whatnot.

Trying to print lists of available stuff
here is hopeless. There are thousands of
peripherals from hundreds of manufacturers.

If you buy a mini, figure that your peripherals
will cost J1S00 (Teletype) on uj>. But mainten¬
ance (see p. SC ) is the biggest problem. If
you buy peripherals from the manufacturer of
the computer, at least you can be sure someone
will be willing to maintain the whole thing.
(Independent peripheral manufacturers will
often repair their own equipment, but nobody
wants to be responsible for the interface.)

If you want a list sec "Table of Mini-
peripheral Suppliers," Computer Dec is ions .

Dec 72, 53-5; more thorough poop Is offered
by Datapro Research Corp., 1 Corporate Center,
Route 38, Moorestown NJ 08057.

As to the serious matter of disks, an ex¬
cellent review article is "Disc Storage for
Minicomputer Applications," Computer Design
June 1973, 55-66. This reviews both principles
of different types of disk drives, and what
various manufacturers offer.

Also helpful on disks and tapes: "Making
a Go of Ministorage," by Linda Dermcr. Com ¬
puter Decisions , Feb 74, 32-38. Best recent
survey.

soared?

It's just a
DECtape driVt
upside down.

Disk drive for the ll.

Hoot such deviate go
at 30 epine a second,
or 1800 rpm. The heads
that read and write
information are on
moving arms that have
to be poeitioned on
the different traoke.

(Some dieke have a head
for every track, which
aoete more.)

If you have disk drives
($5600 each) you need a
controller ($5500). Sigh.

The brown-coated diek
iteelf ie hidden in the
plastio case. Never¬
theless, they sometimes
get eoratahed or break.

A diek costs $75 and
holds up to 2,400,000
characters of infor¬
mation (1.2 million
PDP-11 words, which
are 18 bite each).

TYPIttL

(Hr

1 p

Prints some 300 lines
a minute (faster if
the lines are narrow).
Price around $15,000.

a>*svrt y

A card reader . .

pulses to the computer

based on tho holes
punched in the aarde.

Tome m we Boa

Surely nobody can resist the peripheral* offered
by General Turtle, Inc., 545 Technology Square, Cam¬
bridge, Massachusetts 021)9.

The Turtle ie e eort of caeaerole on wheele that
take* a pencil down the Middle . Attached to your
computer, It can be programmed to rambLe around draw¬
ing picture*, or juat do wheellee on the parquetry.
*600.

Then the Music Box le *600. It elnge in four
voices, enough for a lot of Vivaldi, doe* five octave*
and looka to the computer like e Teletype. They will
play you samples on the phone (611/661-1773).

For either of theae you need a Controller (*1300).

BRAILLE

Ho joke here. People are etill Baking
Braille copies of things by hand. But tha way
to do It is by computeri tha machine can punch
out new copiee of whatever'e stored in it,
repeatedly.

A Braille-punching adapter kit is avail¬
able for the plain 33 Teletype. I believe
from Honeywell.

A elBllar adapter kit for I We Syetem 3
ie available from IBM.

(It le of Interest that an early usa of
Mooere' TRAC Language was with Braille conver¬
sion.)

N\A6*Ktki WOo^Kfr

Any nuuber of different magnetic device*
are used for mas* storage of lymbolic (digital)
information* each has Its own medium, or fore
of storage.

The ones which are removable (called "re¬
movable media") are of all sorts.

EFFECTIVELY STANDARDIZED BY IBM

3/4-inch magnetic tape.

Pre-196S: 6 tracka date, 1 track parity.
Post-1965: B Hacks data, 1 track parity.
2741 disk

Stack of removable platters size of a
layer cake.

3330 disk

Same but bigger cake,
disk cartridge

Plastic case, size of coolie hat, en¬
closing disk,
floppy disk

rlesible, card-thin disk enclosed in
square 8" envelope,
data cell (not very coemon)

Plastic strips pulled out of wedge-
shaped tubes arranged in a rotating
cylinder. Strip is pulled out of this
carousel, whipped around a drue to make
temporary drum memory, returned to case.

EFFECTIVELY STANDARDIZED BY OTHERS

LINCtapS

3/4-lnch tape on a 4-inch reel (fits in
pocket]. specially coated against fric¬
tion, developed at Lincoln Labs for LINC
computer (see p. 41).

DECtape

Same site and reel but differently for¬
matted for DEC machines (varies with
K>dsl). Very reliable. A personal fav¬
orite of many programmer*.

3M CARTRIDGE

The Scotch-tepe people eay the cassette
i* unreliable, and offer as an alterna-
tlva a belt-driven quarter-inch baby,
coating maybe *1000 without interface.
CRAM (Card Random Access Memory)— rare

Big pieces of plastic (about four inches
by two feet) pulled by notches out of a
cartridge end whipped around a drum.
National Cash Register.

HARDLY STANDARDIZED AT ALL

"Cassettes”-- Philips-type audio-type cassette.
U»«d by vArioui manufacturer* in
various way*. Sykes. Sycor, DEC, Data
General and others have separate, and us¬
ually inctsspetible, eyatema.

never know what you’ll see nest. In 1969
firm announced a "high-density r.ad-only
sry davice" which anyone could see wee e

A LITTLE GEM FROM THE IBM SONGBOOK
(Who lays IBM doein’t encourage Individualism?
To th* tuna of ’Pack Up Your Troublai
In Your Old Kll Bag.")

"TO THOMAS J. WATSON, Preaidanl. IBM"

Pack up your troubles-- Mr. Watson’s here!
And smile, smile, smile.

He Is the genius In our IBM
He's the man worth while.

He's inspiring all the time.

And very versatile-* ohl

He la our strong and able President!

His smile’s worth while.

"Great organizer and a friend so true."

Say all we boys.

Ever he thinks of things to say and do
To Increase our Joys.

He Is building every day

In his outstanding style— so

Pack up your troubles, Mr. Watson's here

And Smile-- Smile-- Smile.

(As a nostalgic public service
Advanced Computer Techniques, Inc., of
Boston, gave sway LPa of IBM songs at the
'89 SJCC. They might Just have some left...)

"THERE IS A WORLD ELSEWHERE.”

-- Corlolanua

There Is no way to eacape IBM entirely. IBM
mediate* our contact* with government and medi¬
cine, with libraries, bookkeeping system*, and
bank balances. But theee Intrusions are still lim¬
ited, and moat of us don't hsve to live there.

There are many computer people who refuae
to have anything to do with IBM systems. Others,
not so emphatic, will tell you pointedly that they
prefer to stay as far away from IBM computers
aa possible. If you ask why. they may tell you
they don't care to be bothered with restrictive,
unwieldy and unnecessary complications (the JCL
language ia usually mentioned). This is one
reason that quite a few people atick with minicom¬
puters, or with firms using large computers of
other brands.

It is possible to work productively in the
computer field and completely avoid having to
work with IBM-style systoms. Many people do.

i3N\ LW

NEW CHIPS. . .

IBM can put pretty much anything on a tingle
chip, to make a functioning machine the size of a
postage stamp; but so csn a lot of other companies.

The question realty becomes whether what
goes on that chip ia a worthwhile machine that does
what people want.

.. .BUT THE SAME OLD BLOCK?

It la by no means clear that IBM has any
general ability to make computer systems easy to
uao.

This is a psychological problem.

Aa a corporation they are used to designing
systems that people have to use by fist, and must
be trained to use. contributing to the captivity
and inertia of the customer base. Thus the notion
of making things deeply and conceptually straight¬
forward. without special Jargon or training, may
not be a concept the company is ready for.

The famous Consent Decree of January 1956. (In a consent decree,
an sccused party admits no guilt but agrees to behave In
certain ways thereafter ) In response to a federal anti-trust
suit. IBM agreed to;

sell as well as lease its computers, and repair those
owned by others;

permit attachments to Its lessed computers,
not require certain package deals;
license various patents;
not buy up used machines;

ind get out of the business of supplying computer

services, i.e . programming and hourly rentals.

Unbundling decision, late sixties. While this was not a government
action bul a an internal policy decision by the company, it some
how had a public-relations appearance o( ofllcial compulsion.
Beset by pressures from makers of look-alike machines, users of
competitive equipment, and the threat o( anti-trust action, IBM
decided to change its policy and sell programs without computers
and computers without programs. Delight amongst the industry
turned to chagrin as this became recognized as a price hike.

The Telex Decision, September '73; Telex Corp. of Tulsa was awarded
>352,500,000 in triple damages [since reduced) lor losses attributed
to IBM’s "predatory" pricing and other marketing practices.

Much more important. IBM was required to disclose the
detailed electronics required to hook things to their computers and
accessories within sixty days ol announcing any. This was a great
relief for the whole industry. Essentially it mesnt IBM could no
longer dictate what you attach to their machines Unfortunately,
it is not clear whether this will stand.

But what we're waiting to hear about ia whether the Nixon Justice
Department la, or ia not, going to press the big antl-truat suit
which has been long brewing, al the persistent request of other
firms in the Industry.

"THINK OF THE COMPUTER AS ENERGY."
says a recent series of IBM ads.

Bul in terms of monopoly, price, and
the world's convenience, there would
seem only one way to complete the
analogy, via.;

"THINK OF THE COMPUTER AS ENERGY.

"Think of IBM as King Faisal."

SOME DIVISIONS OF IBM you may hear about

OPD

FED

ASDD

Components

8RA

Watson Lab

Office Products Division. Typewriters, copter*.

Data Processing Division. Computers and accessories.
Federal Systems Division. Big government contracts:

NASA atufl, and who knows what.

Advanced Systems Development Division. Very secret.
Division.

Msksa pans for tha othar guys. Including Integrated circuits.
Scianca Resaarch Associates. Chicago. Publishes taxtbooka
and learning kits.

T.J. Watson Rsaearch Laboratory. Weatchaater County,
north of Nsw York City. Tbaoratlcal and lookahead research.

fa.yi/6 of thf

IBM UMJRCIM

For a long time, during the
sixties. IBM's high prices provided
an environment that made It easy for
other companies to come into the field
and sail computers and peripherals.
These high prices were referred to ■(
"the IBM umbrella."

However, thle era ha* ended.
IBM now cuts prices in whatever ereee
It'e threatened. A brief flourishing of
companies making add-on disk and
core memories (or IBM computers has
become precarious; not only will IBM
now cut prices, but they have shown
themaelvas still disposed to invent new
restrictive arrangements (the recent
"virtual memory" announcement lor
the 370 claimed that the program
will only work oo IBM disk and coral.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Harvey □. Shapiro, "l.B.M. and all the dwarfs."
Naw York Times Magazine . July 29, 1973,
10-38.

An objective, (actual article, sympa¬
thetic to IBM-- although it drew at least
one irate letter from an ibmer who didn’t
think it sympathetic enough.

"IBM: Time to THINK Small?" Newsweek. Octo¬
ber 1, 1973, 60-81.

Frank T. Cary, letter to the editor, Newsweek .
Ocl. IS 73, p t A snappish reply to
the above by the IBM Board Chairman,
who evidently didn't like the article very
much.

Robert Simuelson, "IBM's Methods." Naw York
Times Sunday financial section. June 3,
1973, p. 1.

-♦This article gives a unique
glimpse of some of the interesting things
that came to light in the Control Data suit
against IBM-- citing trial documents never
publicly released

* William Rodgers. Think , Stein and Day. 1969.
Subtilled A Biography of the Wataons
and IBM .

—► Concentrates on the daya before
computers. Fascinating profile of Watson,
a business tiger; but the view of the cor¬
poration in an evolving nation la general
Americana that transcends fiction.

Would you believe Rodgers says
Watson was the kingmaker wo put General
Ike in the White House?

Unfortunately, the book has relatively
leas on the computer era, so the inside
story of many of their momentous decis¬
ions since then remains to be told.

Hey wood Gould. Corporation Freak . Tower (paper¬
back. J

Marvelous; hard to get; Gould thinks
IBM quietly bought up all the copies.

The musinga of a sophisticated. clever
and observant cynic who began knowing
nothing about IBM. Gould's wide-eyed obser¬
vation of its corporate style and atmosphere
is a jolt to those of us who've gotten used
to it And he thought it was Just another btg
company!

Anonymous. "Anti-Trust: A New Perspective."
Datamation , Oct 73. 183-186.

Richard A. McLaughlin. "Monopoly Is Not a Game,"
Datamation . Sept. 1973, 73-77.

-*■ Questionnaire survey Intended to
test truth of common accusation* against IBM.
(Discussed in text above.)

W.David Gardner. "The Government's Four Years
and Four Month* In Pursuit of tBM." Data ¬
mation , June 1973, 114-115.

Almoat any issue of Computerworld or Datamation ,
the two main industry news publications,
carries arUcles mentioning complaint* about
IBM from various quarters on various Issues.
Datamation 's letters are also sometimes Juicy
on the topic.

Any issue of On Line , a news sheet of th* Computer
Industry Association, ten bucks a year.

(C1A-- no relation to the Intelligence agency
-- 16255 Ventura Blvd ., Enclno, CA 91316.)

T.A- Wise, "l.B.M.'a >5,000,000.000 Gamble."
Fortune . Oct 1986.

Daniel J. Slotnick, "Unconventional systisi.'
proc. SJCC 1967, S77-4B1.

Interesting, aeong othar rsaaona.

(or the haavlneaa of tha sarcase directed
et IBM and ite larger cc*puters.

* Killian Rodgers, "IBM on Trial." Harper 's.
May 1974, 79-84.

Continues where Think left off;
examines sone of the dirt"that caste out
in the Telex case, and other things.

The euthor regret* not being able to liat more
articles and book* favorable to IBM. but these do not
seem to turn up *o much However, here ere e few.

A Computer Perepecttve . by the office of Charlee
end Ray Eamea, Harvard U. Press. 113.

Angelina Pantagea, "IBM Abroad." Datamation .
December 1972, 54-57.

For an example ol the kind of adulation of IBM
beaed on faith, aeo Henry C. Wellich.
"Truei-Buating tha U.S.A.," Newaweek
1 Ocl 73, p. *0.

Th* IBM Songbook. any year-- they haven't been
issued since the fifties-- Is definitely a
collectible.

IBM announced a number of worthy objectives when the 360
line was announced in 1964. IBM should certainly be thanked for
at least their lip service to these noble goals.

1. ’One machine for all purposes, business and scientific.’
(Thus the name ”360," for the "full circle" of applications.)

By "business" this mainly meant decimal , at four bits a digit.
Actually this meant grafting 4-bit decimal hardware to an other¬
wise normal binary computer, and making both types of users share
the same facility.

2. 'Information storage and transmission will be stan¬
dardized.' The 360 was set up to handle information 4 bits at
a time, 8 bits at a time, 16, 32, and 64 bits at a time. (The
preceding standard had been 6, 18 and 36 bits at a time.)

In their 360 line, IBM also replaced the industry’s stan¬
dard ASCII code with a strange alphabetical code called EBCDIC
("Extended Binary Coded Decimal Information Code"), ostensibly
built up from the 4-bit decimal code (BCD), but believed by*
cynics to have been created chiefly to make the 360 incompatible
with other systems and terminals.

Unfortunately this compatibility has been undermined bv
numerous factors, especially the variety of operating systems

intii?atei lf ‘| 0Zftn m ;N or types • and the language processors
intricately graded according to computer size. Both these fac-

Juters^WMir^^^ct ■ pr °« r “» £«£« c«-

r 0 e ffect of this Standardization" has indeed

e " °J aCllltatC t *> e novin * °f Programs from small computers
to big ones, a more important effect has perhaps been to make it

jlf- rd lo move from a computer to a smaller one. Note TTTS-

usefulness of this apparent paradox to“rBM's mTiTetinR.

The secret of it all, of course, lies in IBM’s keen under¬
standing of how to sell big computers. The comptroller or
somebody like him, generally makes the final decision: and if
he is told that the one computer will run "all kinds" of pro¬
grams, that naturally sounds like a saving. Shades of the F-
111. (Businessmen’s trust and respect for IBM is discussed
elsewhere in this article.)

7H£ BkrQOes'TioMS

Between the trade press and dozens of acquaintances
In the field, almost everything 1 hear about IBM and its
products is negative (say five or ten to one)-- except from
people who work or have relatives there.

Perhaps it’s Just sour grapes. Or the authority-
hating character of research types. Or selective reading.

Or perhaps there really Is something sinister.

The major questions are these.

1. How clean is their salesmanship?

2. Are their systems unnecessarily difficult or

cumbersome on purpose?

3. How deep is their system of entrapment and

forced commitment of the customer? How
necessary are the de-standardl 2 ations and
the constant changes?

4. Do they have a final liberating vision? Do they

really, after all. Intend to bring about a day
when life is easier for people? When the
difficulties of present-day computer systems,
especially theirs, wither away? 1 think that
history's Judgment on IBM in cur time
may narrow down to that simple question.

(In this light it is not hard to understand
IBM's stand on software copyrights vs. patents.
IBM Is against programs being patentable, which
would cover abstracted properties, but argues
in favor of copyright, whose protection is
probably more limited to the particulars of a
given program. If they have their way. It would
be assured that IBM could use any ingenious
new programming tricks without compensation,
whereas all unnecessary complications of bulky,
cumbersome software would be covered In
entirety by copyright.)

Finally, it has not been demonstrated that
IBM has any general ability to make systems
conceptually simple and easy to use. (Two
good examples of hard systems are the Mag
Tape Selectrlc and Datatext-- easy for program¬
mers, but hardly for secretaries.) There seems
to be no emphasis on elegance or conceptual
simplicity at IBM. Those who adopt such a
philosophy (such as Kenneth Iverson) do so
on their own.

As mentioned earlier, this has something
to do with the fact that individuals generally
use IBM's systems because they have to, being
employees or clients of the firms that rent IBM
equipment, so there is no impetus to design
programs or systems to run on simple or clear-
minded principles, or dress out Intricate systems
so they can be used easily.

4. THE IMAGE.

It is hard to analyze images, corporate or
peraonal They are often received in such differ¬
ent wsya by different populations. But there may be
a commonality to the IBM image sa generally seen.
The Image of IBM involves some kind of cold magic,
a brooding sense of sterile efficiency. But other
things are percolating in there. If we slide that
connotation of efficiency aside, the IBM Image
seems to have two other principal components,
authoritarianism and complacency. It is this mix¬
ture that longhair* will naturally find revolting.

This same combination, however, may be exactly
what it is that appeals to business-management
typas.

IF YOU REALLY WANT IT.

you can gat charactar-by-charactsr
responding systems on IBM computers.
The new Stock Exchange system uses a
"Telecommunications Access Method"
permitting non-IBM terminals to respond
character-by-character, just at systems
for non-computer-people should.

Trying to use this Input-output
program on your local IBM computer 1*
another problem, though. Aside from
program rental coata. there ta the prob-
lam o l lla compatibility with the whole
Una of IBM software. Adaptations and
reprogramming would probably be
necessary up end down the line ‘

THE FUTURE

What will IBM do next?

Speculation Is almost futile, but necessary
anyhow. The prospects are fascinating if not
terrifying.

No one can ever predict what IBM will do; but
trying to predict IBM's actions-- IBM-watching is
something like Kremlin-watching— is everybody's
hobby in the field. And its consequences affect
everybody. With so many things possible, and
determined only in the vaguest way by technical
considerations, the question of what IBM chooses
to do next is pretty scary. Because whatever
they do we'll be stuck with. They can design our
lives for the foreseeable future .

We know that in the future IBM will announce
new machines and systems, price changes (both up
and down) in fascinating patterns, rearrangements
of what they will "support," anfi changes in the
contracts they offer (see box. "IBM's Control").
Occasional high-publicity speeches by IBM high
officers will continue to be watched with great care.
But mainly we don't know.

IBM's slick manufacturing capabilities mean
that practically any machine they wanted to make,
and put on a single chip, they could, and in a
very short time. (The grapevine has it that the
Components Division, which makes the computer
parts, has bragged within the company that it
doesn't really need the other divisions any more
— it could just put whole computers on teeny
chips if it wanted to.)

In this time of the 370, things are for the
moment stable. The 370 computer line is still their
main marketing thrust. Having sold a lot of 370
computers (basically sped-up 360s), their idea is
at the moment to sell conversion jobs to adapt the
370 to run the new "Virtual System" control pro¬
gram (VS or OS/VS or various other names). This
system (which is. Incidentally, widely respected)
makes core memory effectively much larger to
programs that run on it. This effectively encour¬
ages programmers to use tons of core, by means
of virtual memory; essentially getting people in
the habit of programming as if core were infinite.
This extension of apparent memory size distracts
from any inefficiencies of both locally written pro¬
grams and IBM programs, thus tending to increase
use and rental charges.

When that marketing impetus runs out we'll
see the next thing.

The other new IBM initiative is with smaller
machines, the System 3 and System 7. being pushed
for relatively small businesses. That 19 where they
see another new market. How easy and useful their
programs are in this area will be an important
question.

With the System 7. a 16-bit minicomputer
for $17,000, IBM has at last genuinely entered the
minicomputer market. (Balancing its speed and
cobi against comparable machines, we can figure
the IBM markup as being about 50%. which Is
typical.)

In addition, it ia rumored that IBM might
put out a tiny business mini, to sell out of OPD.
( Datamation . Dec 72, 139.) But really, who knowa.

In addition to this huge-memory strategy for
its big machines, and the starting (oray Into spe¬
cialized mini systems, there is the office strategy
and "word processing."

IBM has conceptually consolidated its
various magic-typewriter and text services under
the name of "word processing," which means any
handling of text that goes through their machines.
This superficially unites their OPD efforts (type¬
writers and dictation machines) with things going
on in DPD, such as Datatext, and allays inter-
divisional rivalries for awhile Also, by stress¬
ing the unity of ths subject matter, it leaves the
door open for lster snd more glamorous initiatives,
such ss hypertext systems (see "Carmody's System."
flip side) .

In other words, the foot is In the door. Mr.
Businessman has the idea that automatic typing
and things like that are IBM's special province.

Few firms anywhere have the confidence
to advertise generloaily a product which
la mad* by other* as well, as in IBM's
"Think of the computer ss energy" series.

R4K. IgM ’

Even if it is true, as Anonymous says (see Bibliography)
that IBM intimidates people and keeps its enemies
from getting jobs et IBM-oriented establishments,
that’s not the end of the world.

\ Grosch, Gould, Rodgers and McGurk are alive and working
Extramural harassment like that employed by CM against
Nader, for example, has not been reported.

END OF THE DINOSAURS?

To a very great extent, IBM's computer
market Is based on big computers run in batch
mode, under a very obtrusive operating system.

Many people are beginning to notice, though,
that many things are more sensibly done on small
computers than on big ones, even in companies
that have big computers. That way they can be
done right away rather than having to wait in line.
Is this the mammal that will eat the dinosaur eggs?

On the other hand, a very unfortunate trend
is beginning to appear, an implicit feud within
large organizations, which may benefit IBM's big
computer approach. Those who advocate mini¬
computers are being opposed by managers of the
big computing installations, who see (he minis
as threatening their own power and budgets. This
may for a long time hold the minis back, perhaps
with the help and advice of computer salesmen who
feel likewise threatened. But there will be no
holding back the minis and their myriad offspring,
the microprocessors (see p. ^ ). And the inroads
should begin soon.

(Others are growing (o know and love true
high-capacity time-sharing as a way of life, like
that offered for DEC. GE and Honeywell machines.
This, too, may begin to have derogatory effects on
IBM's markets.)

Finally, it must be noted that almost all big
companies have computers, usually IBM computers,
and so an era of marketing may well have ended.

It may be possible for IBM to go on selling bigger
and bigger computers to the customers who already
have them, but obviously this growth can no
longer be exponential.

A GfOT) IW

Herb Grouch, now editorial director of Computerworld , is perhaps
worst enemy. Once he worked for old man Watson, and was the
3M employee allowed to have a beard. Now. among other Udngs, ne
/ 7 , . _,__.houi the Menace of IBM.

Yet IBM'* main computer sales strategy today is to stream the a van
tag** of big computers with lot* of core memory (and persuade you you
don't want highly Interactive system* or independent minicomputers)

And the fundamental rule sUUng the advantage* of big computars
la called Grosch's Law , formulated year* ago by none other. See p.

An Interesting example of an IBM non-
breakthrough we* the dramatic ennouncetnent In
1984 of the 360 computer, portreyed as a machine
which would at last combine the functions of
both "butlnaes" computer* and "scientific" com*
putere. But other companies, such ea Burroughs
(with the 5500) had been doing this for some
time. The quaint separation of powers between
scientific computer* (with all-binary storage of
numbers) and business computers (decimal
storage) we* baaed only on tradition and mar¬
keting consideration*, and was otherwise unde¬
sirable. In amalgamating the "two types," IBM
was only rescinding their own previous un¬
necessary distinction. The drams of the an¬
nouncement derived in large measure from the
streas they had previously laid on the dlvtelon.
( Fortune ran an Interesting piece on the decision
struggles preceding the Introduction of the 360
computer, and the Internal arguments as to whe¬
ther there should be one line of computers or two.
See the five-bllUon-dollar gamble piece. Biblio¬
graphy.)

Thla ties In closely with another interes¬
ting aspect of the IBM Image, the public notion
that IBM la a great Innovator, bringing out
novel technologies all the time. It is well known
In the field that they are not: IBM usually does not
bring out a new type of product until some other
company has pioneered it. (Again remember
the earlier point, that the product offering is a
strategic maneuver.) Bui of course such facta
do not appear in the promotional literature, nor
are they volunteered by the salesman.

The expression for this in the field is
that IBM "makes things respectable." That is,
customers get that reassured feeling, when IBM
adds other people's Innovations to their product
line, and decide it's okay to go ahead and rent
or buy such a product. (This also sometimes
kick* business back to the original manufacturer.)

A few examples of things that were already
on the market when IBM brought them out. often
making them sound completely new: transistorized
computers (first offered by Philco). virtual mem¬
ory (Burroughs). microprogramming (introduced
commercially by Bunker-Hamo).

This Is not to say that IBM is incapable of
Innovation: merely that they are never in a
hurry about it. The introduction of IBM pro-
ducta ia orchestrated like a military campaign,
and what IBM brings out is always a carefully-
planned. profit-oriented step intended not to
dislocate its product line. This is not to say
that they don’t have new stuff in the back room,
a potential arsenal of surprises of many types.

But it is probable that most of them will never
be seen. This is because of IBM’s "impact”
problem .

Unique in IBM's position is the problem of
fitting new products into the market alongside
its old ones. Its problem is much worse, say,
than that of Procter 6 Gamble. The problem is
not merely Its size and the diversity of its
products, but the fact that they may interfere
with each other ("Impact" each other, they say)
in very complicated ways. A program like
their Datatext, for example, which allows cer¬
tain kinda of text input and revision from ter¬
minals, may affect its typewriter line. These
are no small matters: the danger is that some
new comblnstion of products will save the cus¬
tomers money IBM would otherwise be getting.
Innovations must expand the amount IBM is
taking In. or IBM loses by making them.

These complications of the product line
in a way provide a counterbalance to IBM's fear¬
some power. The corporation has an Immense
Inertia based on Its existing product line and
customer base, and on ways of thinking which
have been carefully promulgated and explained
throughout Its huge ranks, that cannot be
revised quickly or flippantly.

Nevertheless It is remarkable how at
every turn-- notably when people think IBM
will be eel back-- they manage to make policy
deciaiona or strategic moves which further con¬
solidate their poaltion. Often these seem to
involve restricting the way their computers will
be used (see box, "lBM'e Control,")

(The most ironic such countermove by IBM
occurred a few years ago with the Bo-called
"unbundling” decision. IBM at last agreed (on
complaint from other software firms) to stop
giving its programs away to people renting the
hardware. Glee was widespread In the Industry,
which expected IBM to lower computer prices
in proportion to what it would now charge for
the software. Not at all IBM lowered its com¬
puter prices by a minuscule amount and slapped
heavy new prices on the software-- often
charges of thousands of dollars per month.)

A persistant rumor is that IBM fires
all Its salesmen in a geographic
area if a key or preelige sale ia
"lost." as when M.l.T,'a Project
MAC switched over to General Electric
computers in the sixties, or when
Western Electric Engineering Research
Center passed over IBM computers
to get a big PDP-10.

Much at some people would like
to believe these stories. there seems
to be no documentation. You would
think one such victim would write
an article about it LI it were true.

Finally, there la the popular doctrine of
IBM's Infallibility. Thla. loo. la a ways from
the truth. The moat conspicuous example waa
something called TSS/360.

TSS/360 waa a time-sharing system--
that Is, the control program to govern one
model of the 360 as a time-sharing computer.
According to Datamation ("IBM Phases Out Work
on Showcase TSS Effort." Sept. 1. 1971, 58-9).
over 400 people worked on It Bt once for a total
of some 2000 man-years of effort. And It was
scrapped, a writeoff of some 100 million dollars
In loat development costs. The system never
worked wall enough. Reputedly users had to
wait much too long for ths computer's responses,
and the system could not really compete with
those offered elsewhere.

The failure and abandonment of this pro¬
gram is thus responsible for IBM's present non¬
competitive position In time-sharing; customers
are now assured by IBM that other things are
more important. IBM-haters thank their stars
that this happened. Cynics think it conceivable
that high-power time-sharing was dropped by
IBM in order to shoo its customer base toward
areas it controlled more completely.

Two other conspicuous IBM catastrophes
have been specific computers: the 360 model 90
In the late sixties, and a machine called the
STRETCH somewhat earlier. Both of these
machines worked and were delivered to cus-
lomers. (Indeed, the STRETCH la said by some
to have been one of the best machines ever.)

But they were discontinued by IBM as not suf¬
ficiently profitable. Therein is said to have
been the "failure." (However, it has been al¬
leged in court cases that these were "knockout"
machines designed to clobber the competition
at a planned loss.)

B. Negative views of IBM systems.

In the technical realm. IBM is widely un¬
loved because many people think some or all of
their computers and programs are either poor,
or far from what they should be. The reasons
vary.

Some of the people feeling this way are
IBM customers , and for a lime they had an or¬
ganized lobby, called SHARE (which also facil¬
itated sharing of programs) . Recently, however,
SHARE has become IBM-dominated, a sort of
company union, according to my sources.

The design of the 360, while widely ac¬
cepted as a fact of life, is sharply criticized
by many. (See "What's wrong with the 3607",

P 11 -)

IBM's programs, while they are available
for a broad variety of purposes, are often notor¬
iously cumbersome, awkward and inefficient,
and sometimes dovetail very badly. However,
the less efficient a program is. the more money
they make from it. A program that has to be
run for an hour generates twice as much revenue
than if It did its work in thirty minutes; a pro¬
gram that has to be run on a computer with, say,
a million spaces of core memory generates ten
times the revenue It would in two hundred thou¬
sand.

IBM programs are often thought to be
rigid and restrictive.

The complex training and restrictions
that go with IBM programs seem to have
interesting functions. (See box. "IBM's Control.")

C. Theories of IBM design.

The question Is. how could a company
like IBM create anything like the 360 (with its
severe deficiencies) and its operating system or
control program OS (with its sprawling compli¬
cations, not present in competitors' systems)?
Three answers are widely proposed: On Purpose
Ithe conspiracy theory), By Accident (the
blunder theory), and That's How They're Set
Up (the Management Science theory) . These
views are by no means mutually exclusive.

The Management Science theory of IBM
design is the only one of these we need take up.

The extensive use of group discussion and
committee decisions may tend to create awkward
design compromises with a certain intrinsic
aimlessness, rather than incisively distinct and
simple structures. (See Gould's marvelous
chapter. "The Meeting." 58-80.)

Their use of immense teams to do big
programming joba. rather than highly motivated
and especially talented groups, la widely viewed
as counterproductive. For instance, Barnet A.
Wolff, in a letter to Datamation (Sept. 1, 1971,
p. 13) saya a parucular program

"remain* ineffficlent, probably because of

IBM's unfortunate habit of using trainee*

fresh out of school to write their

systems code."

There may also be something in the way that
projects are initiated and laid out from the top
down, rather than acquiring direction from
knowledgeable people at the technical level,
that creates a tendency toward perfunctoriness
and clunky structure.

Thus there may very well be no inlontlonsl
policy of unnecessary complication (see Box,
"IBM's Control") . But the way In which goals
are set and technical decisions delegated may
generate this unnecessary complication.

1 iijeunoiyutiDf-rwt

It is unfortunate that Rodgers'
remarkable book does not lotlow the
details of IBM's computer designs snd
politics In the computer age. to.,
since 1955 Later work, perhaps
helped by some Pentagon Papers, will
have to relate the decision processes
that occurred in thla unique national
insUtution to the eyetams it has
produced and the stamp It has put
j on the world. ____

QUttit HW1

IBM appeared in 1911 aa the con¬
solidation of a number of small companies
making light equipment, under the name
C-T-R Company (Computer-Tabulatlng-
Record). This was prophetic, consid¬
ering how aptly it described the com¬
pany's future business, and especially
prophetic considering that today’s
stored-program computer was undreamed
of at that time.

According to William Rodgers'
definitive company biography Think ,
the company’s creator was a shrewd
operator named Charles R. Flint,
dashing entrepreneur and former gun
runner to the South American republics,
who in his shrewdness brought in to
run the company an incredibly talented,
fire-breathing and self-righteous indi¬
vidual named Thomas J. Watson, even
though Watson at that time was under
prison sentence for his sates practices
at another well-known company . The
sentence was never served, and Watson
went on to preside for many years
over a corporation to which he gave
his unique stamp.

Watson arises from the pages of
Think as a sanctimonious tyrant,
hard as nails yet reverently principled
in his words: the pillar of fervid,
aggressive corporate piety.

IBM was totally Watson's
creation. The company became what
he admired in others, a mechanism
totally obedient to his will and imple¬
menting his forceful and lnspiringly
rationalized convictions with alacrity.

As the Church is said to be the bride
of Christ, IBM might be characterized
as the Bride of Watson, molded to the
styles of demandingness, pressure,
efficiency and pietism which so char¬
acterized that man. But the ideas
flowed from Watson alone, except for
a few confidantes who received his
nod. The company is vastly bigger
now, and slightly more colorful, in a
muted sort of way; but it is still the
stiff and deadly earnest battalion of
his dream.

Because of Watson's background
as salesman, he made Sales the apex
of the corporation. The salesmen had
the most prestige within the company
and could make the most money; below
that was administration, below that,
technical staff.

Watson eliminated the meat-slicing
machines, and pushed the product line
based on punched cards developed by
IBM's first chief engineer, Herman
Hollerith. According to Rodgers, it
was impetus from the Depression, and
the new bookkeeping requirements of
Roosevelt's remedies, that skyrocketed
the firm uniquely during the depths of
general economic catastrophe, till
Watson came to draw the highest salary
of any men in the nation. In 1934 his
Income was 4364,432 (Will Rogers, not
the author of Think , was second with
4324,314) . Watson had neatly arranged
to get 5% of IBM's net profit.

While IBM participated In the
creation of certain early computers, it
la interesting that Watson dismissed
Eckert and Mauchly when they came
around after World War II tring to get
backing for their EN1AC design, in
certain ways the first true electronic
computer Eckert and Mauchly went
to Remington Rand, and the resulting
Unlvac was the first commercial
computer.

However. IBM bounced back
very well. If there was one thing they
knew how to do it was sell, and when
they brought out their computers it
was practically clear sailing, (The
Univac I was the first of many compu¬
ters to be delayed and boggled in the
completion of its software, and this
considerable setback helped IBM get
the lead very quickly; they have
never lost It since.)

In the early sixties the IBM 7090
and 7094 were virtually unchallenged
as the leading scientific computers of
the country But IBM in the late six¬
ties almost relinquished the fields of
very big computers and time-sharing
to other companies, and their compu¬
ters are not regarded as innovative.
Nevertheless, IBM's Systems 360 and
370. despite various criticisms, hive
been very successful; thousands of
them are in operation around the globe,
far more than all their rivals' big
computers all put together. This des¬
pite the fact that some of these systems
have failed, including the big Model 91
(an economic failure) and the TSS/360
time-sharing program, a technical
catastrophe.

They have from time to time
been accused of unfair tactic*, and
various antitrust and other actions
(see "Legal Milestones" box) have
required IBM to change its arrange¬
ments in various ways. One decree
required them to sell the computers
that before they had only rented;
another decision, to. "unbundle." or
sell computers separately from their
programs (previously "given" away
with the computers they ran on). Is
widely believed to have prevented
government action on the same
matter. Showing characteristic
finesse. IBM thereupon lowered the
computer prices almost imperceptibly,
then slapped heavy price-tags on
the programs that had previously
been free.

Recent moves by the government
have suggested an especially serious
and far-reaching anti-trust suit against
IBM. possibly one that might break the
company up, with its separate divisions
going various ways. However, in
today's climate of cozy relations be¬
tween business and government. It is
hard to imagine that such matters
would not be settled to IBM's liking.
This lends a curious tint to a remark
one IBM person has made to the author,
to wit, that maybe IBM wants to be
broken up. That might be one way of
reducing the unwieldiness and inter¬
dependency of Us product line; In
addition to reducing its vast, under¬
utilized personnel base. (Another
angle: Acting Attorney General Bark
has expressed the view that IBM i*
big only because its products and
management are wonderful, so the
antitrust case may simply evaporate
during the rump days of the Nlxcm
incumbency.)

An interesting aspect of IBM publicity ia its stress on statue.
Publicity photographs often show a subordinate seeking advice
from a superior. IBM ads appeal to the corporation president
in ell of ua- - either Doing II Alone (taking a long walk over an
Executive Decision) or soberly directing a leaser employee
In one extraordinary case, we nw worahlpful convicts at the
feet of a Teacher implausibly situated in the corner of a prison
yard.

PROVINCIAL?

There would teem to be no queitlon that
IBM people ere comparatively conservative and
conventional. This partly because that's who IBM
hires (though they reportedly urge tolerance of
the unusual employee In a training film, "The Wild
Duck"). A huge number oflBM people never
worked for anybody else: obviously thla affect!
the perspective, like slaying at one university
all your life, or in one city.

It may also be that because IBM places such
a premium on dependability and obedience, new
ideas (and the abilities needed to generate them)
naturally run Into a little trouble. Some critics
find among IBM people a heavy concern with con¬
ventional symbols of achievement, and (unfor¬
tunately) seeing the world stuck all over with
conventional labels and Middle American atareo-
typee

Some of the most amusing material on thla
comet from an odd source a writer named
Heywood Could who. all unprepared, became a
consultant to IBM. earned unconscionable amounts
of money ($40,000 In six months). and lived to
writ# a very funny and obaervant book about It
(see Bibliography) .

I hope to be able to report In future
editions of this book that IBM has moved
firmly and crtdlbly toward making its sys¬
tems clear and simple to use. without re-
rsquiring laborious attention to needless
complication! and oppressive rituals.

I X One of the things we often forget Is

'■‘'j lhat public-spirited corporations can be

I reached, they do listen, and IBM la nothing
\_y If not public-spirited-- except when It
I comes to the design of its systems.

t~\ J

'*-f f hope that thla book will help

people who are Inconvenienced by computer
_systems to understand and pinpoint what
J they think is wrong with lhe systems-- in
(~7\ their data structure, interactive properties,
j or other design features-- and that they
ZJ. “HI try to express their dlecontents Intel- /
\ llgently and constructively to those res- \
J ponslble. Including, where appropriate. /
International Business Machines Corporation. I

2. SALES TECHNIQUES.

But it la necessary on these matters to see
how difficult things can be for IBM people. To be
identified as an IBM person la something like wear¬
ing a ring in your noas, a yarmutka or a halo:
an antrapment in a social rola that makes the indi¬
vidual's position awkward among outsiders. IBM
people often have to take guff at parties, unless
they are IBM parties. Defensiveness may account
lor some of the Overdo, and some of the clannlah-

BRA1NWASHED?

It Is true that IBM people are essentially In
their own world . One theorv is that comparl-
mentsllzation within the firm (rather visible in
their designs) may tend to stifle. Indeed, because
IBM people can expect to be briefed and schooled
in every technical matter they will need to know
for a given assignment, the incentive to follow
technical developments through outside magazines
and societies may be reduced. Between Think
magazine and corporate briefings, it is possible
for IBM people to be comparatively (or even com¬
pletely) unaware of Innovations elsewhere In the
field, except ax these new developments are
presented to them within lhe organization. In
thla light it la easy to understand the lbmera'
sense of certainty that their firm invented every¬
thing and is at the forefront.

Of couree many fine research efforts do go on
there, in considerable awareness of what's hap¬
pening elsewhere. Particular individuals at IBM
have done excellent research on everything from
computer hidden-line Imaging lo the structure of
the genetic code and computer-synthesized holo-
grsmt. APL itself (see pp.JL‘31. as developed
by Iverson at Harvard and later programmed by
him at IBM, is another example of sophisticated
individual creativity there. So it's entirely
possible. But IBM certainly has no monopoly on
understanding or creativity, and IBM-hatera
sometimes talk aa if the reverse is true.

It is IBM's alleged misbehavior in pursuit
of sales that has drawn some of the strongest
criticism within the Industry, as well as consid¬
erable litigation. Their "predatory pricing"

(a term used by the judge in the recent Telex
decision), and other mean practices, are (whe¬
ther true or false) folklore within the industry.

These accusations are well summarized
by "Anonymous" in a recent article (see Biblio¬
graphy) . Basically the accusations against
IBM's sales practices are that they play dirty:
if you. say. the computer manager in a business
firm, want to buy equipment from another out¬
fit. IBM (so the story goes) will go over your
head to your boss, accuse you of Incompetence,
try to get you fired if you appose them, and
Heaven knows what else. Anonymous claims
lhat various forms of threat. Intimidation, "hard¬
sell scare tactics" and "behind-the-scenes man¬
ipulation" are actually standard practice in IBM
sales, he or she alleges various instances in
certain municipalities.

Such behavior is emphatically denied,
though not in relation to lhat article, by Board
Chairman Cary. In a recent letter to Newsweek
(aee Bibliography). Cary emphasizes the impor¬
tance of IBM's 76-page business Conduct Guide¬
lines. Whether these are publicly examinable
is nut stated.

These charges were also taken up con¬
cretely in a recent survey of computing managers
done by Datamation (summarized by McLaughlin
in "Monopoly Is Not a Game;" see Bibliography).
In Datamation 's analysis of this survey, the
managers did not seem to agree with Ihese
charges against IBM. However, it must be
noted-- and this seriously calls into question
the entire survey as analyzed-- that out of 1100
panelists to the questionnaire. Datamation only
considered 389 responses "usable." partly (it is
staled) because many did not give data allowing
themselves to be identified. Considering the
widespread (ear of IBM in the field, this may
have strongly biased the poll in favor of IBM.

"When we went from IBM to
National Cash Register, it was like
the difference between night and day,"

Retired hardware executive,
talking about Inventory programs

(Incidentally, ft ia amusing lo note that
even In Ihlt remaining company, in terms of
"performance per dollar," the managers surveyed
(and aurviving the weedout) ranked the top
three companies as DEC. Burroughs and Control
Data. IBM was worst out of 8. Obviously
service counts for a lot.)

An Interesting view on IBM's sales ethics
was expressed recently by Ryal R Poppa,
president of Pertec Corp.

"In the past, when there have been sales
situations where ’you can't honor the
policy and win the deal.' IBM has violated
the policy with the practice, he said."

However, he believes that situation Is changing
under IBM's new management, so that the guide¬
lines will be observed in the future. ("Popps
Sees Several IBM Changes." Computerworld.

21 Nov 73. 29.)

The people who take these matters of IBM
sales practices most seriously-- IBM's competi¬
tors-- now have their own organization, the
Computer Industry Association. This is an asso¬
ciation o( computer companies, which has aa
its intention the "establishment and preservation
of a sound and viable U ,S computer industry .
based on... free and open competition." Empha¬
sis theirs. Translation: they're out to get IBM.
President Dan L. McGurk. formerly of Xerox
Data Systems, has blood in his eye. Member¬
ship is open only to computer companies, but
their newsletter On Line is available to indivi¬
duals (see Bibliography) . Anyone seriously
interested in ihese matters is referred to them.

3. TECHNICAL DECISIONS AND DESIGNS
A. Prologue.

Part of the myth of IBM's Corporate perfec¬
tion Is based on the nation Ihsl technical matters
somehow predominate in IBM's decisions, and
that IBM's product offerings and designs thus
emerge naturally and necessarily and inevitably
from these considerations. This is rather far
from the truth.

IBM presents many of their actions as tech¬
nical. even as technical breakthroughs, when
in fact they are strategic maneuvers. The an¬
nouncement of a new computer, for example,
such as lhe 360 or 370. Is usually made to
sound as if they have invented something special,
while in fact they have simply made certain
decisions as to "which way they intend lo go"
and how they plan to market things in the next

m VHttUAC RtCIMUbCS

Now, there are many manufacturers who
think this is very wrong of IBM; who believe
they should have the right to sell accessories
and parts-- especially core and diak memories--
to plug onto IBM's computers. II has been
generally possible for these other manufseturers
to work these interconnections out awhile after
the computer comes out on the market, but
it's getting more difficult.

IBM controls the industry principally by
controlling its customers. Through various
mechanisms, ll seems lo enforce the principle
that "Once an IBM customer, always an IBM
customer ." With an extraordinary degree of
control, surely possessed In no other field by
any other organization in the free world. It
dictates what its customers may buy. and what
they may do with what they gel More than
this: the exactions of loyalty levied upon IBM's
customers are similar. In kind and degree, to
whit U demands of its own employees IBM
makes the customer's employees more and more
like its own employees, committing them as
individual*, and effectively committing the com¬
pany that buys from it, to IBM service In
perpetuity.

Here are some of the ways this system of
control seems to work. We are not saying here
that this is necessarily how IBM plans it.
rather, theme are the virtual mechanics. virtual
In the old sense; this Is how It might as well
be working. In the anthropological sense this
la a "functional" analysis, showing the tie-ins
rather than the actual detailed thought processes
that occur And even if these are really the
mechanics, perhaps IBM doesn't mean them lo be
It might Jual somehow be a continuous accident.

A. Interconnection and compatibilities .

IBM acta aa If it does not want competitors
lo be able to connect thair accessor let to its
computers It's as though GM could design the
roads so •• to prevent the paasage of other
vehicles than Ita own.

Thia is dona several ways. First, IBM
has sometimes used contractual techniques to
prevent such interconnections lo Its systems,
either forbidding other things to be attached
(or et least slapping on extra service charge*
if they erel. or declaring lhat it would not
be responsible (or overall performance of such
s setup, effectively withdrawing the hardware
luerante* that la such a strong selling point

Secondly IBM doe* not tell all lhat need*
to tft known in order to make these intercon¬
nections-- the details of the hardware Interfaces

Finally, IBM can eunply decree , perhaps
claiming technical necessity, that Interconnection
ia Impossible. For Instance. IBM said for a

Thus the Telex Decision of September 17,
1973, in which it was decreed by the judge that
IBM would have to supply complete interface
information promptly when introducing a new
computer, was a source of great jubilation in
the computer field. However, lhat part of the
judgment has since been cancelled.

Much the same problem exists In the soft¬
ware area. IBM Is less than interested in
helping its competitors write programs that hook
up to IBM program*, so the details of program
hookup are not always made clear Here. too.
many smeller companies Insist they should be
made lo do it.

B Control and guidance of what the customer

To ■ remarkable degree, if you are an
IBM customer, you practically have to buy what
they tall you. This IBM manages by an intri¬
cate system of fluctuating degrees of sales and
support and contractual dealing . The IBM cus¬
tomer always has several options, but these are
like forced cards. IBM la always Introducing
and discontinuing products, and changing prices
and contractual arrangements and software op¬
tions in an elaborate choreography, which applies
calculated pressures on the customer. IBM hes
a finely-tuned system of customer incentives by
which It controls product phasing, to use the
polite term, or planned obsolescence, aa some
people cell it.

(Ryal R. Poppa, president of Pertec Corp..
predicts that IBM customers will now be re¬
quired to switch over lo new products every
five or six years, rather than every seven,
which Poppa contends has been the figure.

("Poppa Sees Several IBM Changes." Computer -
world . 21 Nov 73. 29.)

Programs, especially, are available with
different degress of approval from IBM The
technique of "support" Is the concrete manifes¬
tation of approval. A supported program la
one which IBM promises to lix when bugs turn
up. With an unsupported program, you're on
your own. Cod has forgotten you. Because so
much of IBM'* virtue lies In tha strength end
fervor of ita support, the use of unsupported
programs, or unsupported features of supported
programs, is a difficult and risky mailer, like
driving without a map and a spare tire, or even

Availability of products is in general a
matter of exquisite degree. It's not so much
that you can or can't get a particular thing,
but that the pricing and available contracts at
a given time fieri strong pressure to put you
where they have chosen within their currently
featured product line. Moreover, extremely
strong hints are always available; the salesman
wilt tell you whet model of their computers Is
likely to be a dead end, or. on the other hand,
what model is likely to offer various options

and progressive developments in the near future.

Effectively the IBM customer tends to be
frequently trapped in a cage of restrictions,
whether thla cage Is intentionally created by
IBM or not One is reminded of the motto of
T.H. White's anthill in The Once and Future King

THAT WHICH IS NOT FORBIDDEN IS COMPULSORY

The degree to which theae restrictions are
manipulated or intentional is. of course, a matter
of debate.

Some things are half-available, either as
"RPQa" (an IBM term lor special orders--
Raquaet Price Quotation), or available to
sophisticated customers at IBM's discretion.

With all the degrees of availability. It is
easy for IBM to open or close by degrees
various avenues in which customere are inter¬
ested .

D. Captive bureaucracies running in place?

Perhaps lhe most unfortunate thing about
IBM (from an outsider's point of view) is lhat
effectively their systems can only be used by
bureaucracies whom ihey have trelned. From
keypunch operator up lo installation manager,
all are effectively enslaved to curious complex¬
ities that keep changing The ever-changing

ver that IBM's game, intentions]
keep things difficult end intricately

irlng that you can't get the program featu
ought to be able (o get unless you get s

buy opponents
mmersed in lhe
peculiarities of IBM systems, and busy keeping
up with mandatory changes, do not gel uppity.
They are too buty. end the Investment of their
lime and effort it loo high for them lo want to

What it boil* down to It that you. the
customer, have few genuine options, especially
if your firm is already committed to doing cer¬
tain things with a computer. And when IBM
brings out a new computer, the prices and
other Influences are exacungly calculated to
make mandatory the jump they have in mind to
the new model.

change.

Anti-IBM cynics nay that a lot of the
work involved in working with IBM computers
la self-generated, arising from lhe unnecessary
complexities of OS/36D. JCL, TCAM end *o on
But of couree that cannot be evaluated here.

PROSPECTS

(Thl* planning of customer transition*
doe* not always work. Whan the 370 was Intro¬
duced. for instance. IBM had In mind that com¬
panies with a certain size of 380 would trade up
to a bigger 370. In soma cases users traded
down to e mmal ler 370. which wes able lo do the
tame work for leas money, to the acute bother
of IBM )

C. Having to do things jual their way.

IBM ayatema and programs a re set up lo
do things in particular way* To a remarkable
degree, II I* difficult to ua* them in ways not
planned or approved by IBM. and difficult to
tie ayatema and programa together. Programs
and feature* which Lh* casual observer would
suppose ought to be compsnbl*. land not to bs.
For tome reason compatibility always lends to

These remark* should clarify the bleakness
of lh# prospect for men’s future among computer*
If IBM'a system of control reslly doe* work thla
way. and If II la going to go on doing «o Be¬
cause it meant lhe future that aome of ut hope

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"IBM." a* everyone knows, is the trade
mark ot the International Business Machines
Corporation, an immense company cantered in
Armonk. N.Y.. but extending to over a hundred
countries and employing well over a quarter of
a million people.

IBM dominates two Industries, computers
and electric typewriters.

To many people. IBM is synonymous with
computers. Some of the public, indeed, believes
them to be the only computer manufacturer.

In cameras and Him. there ia Kodak. In
automobiles, there la General Motors. And In
the computer field there is IBM.

IBM sells some 65 to 701 of all the com¬
puters and programs that are sold. In this res¬
pect. the balanced near-monopoly, they are like
Kodak and CM.

But there are important differences. £v-
everybody knows whst s earners Is. or an auto¬
mobile. But to many, If not most, people, a
computer la what IBM says it is.

The Importance of this firm, for good or
ill, cannot be overstated: whose legend la so
thick, whose slock prices hsve doubled end re¬
doubled. ten limes over, to its multibllllon-dollar
mass; whose seeding Infallibility-- at least, at
seen by outsiders-- have been the stuff of
legand. whose style has proliferated across the
world, a style which has in a way itself become
synonymous with "computers." whose name sym¬
bolizes for msny people-- remarksbiy, both
those who love it and those who hate it— the
New Age.

The rigidity associated in the public mind
with "the computer" may be related In some
deep way to this organization. As a corporation
they are used to designing systems that people
have to use in their jobs by flat, and thus thera
are few external limitations on the complications
to our lives thst IBM can create.

Many people mistake IBM for "Juat another
big company," and hare lies the danger. IBM's
position in the world is so extraordinary, so
carefully poised tat a result ol various anti¬
trust proceedings end preesutions) juei outside
of tots) monopoly of a vitally important and all-
penetrating Held, that much of what they do has
implications for all ol ua. Ralph Nader 1 a con¬
tention that Genera] Motors is too powerful to
function is an independent government surely
eppllea even more to IBM Generet Motors Is not
in a position to persuade the public thel every
car ha• to have ten wheels and a snowplow
IBM seems in some ways to hsve molded compu¬
ters In its own image, end then persuaded the
world that this is the way they have to be.

But IBM is deeply aeneluve. In its way,
to public relatione. and has woven an extensive
eystam ol political ties end legends (If not
mythology) which have kept It almoat completely
exempt from the critical attention of concerned
citizens.

Thus It If necessary here, simply as a
matter of covering the field at an introductory
level, to raise some questions and critic lams
that occur to people who ere concerned about
IBM IBM presumably will not mind having
these matters raised, their public-eplrited con¬
cern in eo many areas assures that when eome-
thlng eo publicly important ee the character of
their own power Is concerned, occasional
scrutiny should be welcome.

A FINE PROGRESSIVE CORPORATE CITIZEN
AND A WONDERFUL EMPLOYER

It Is Important to note Brat of all that IBM
is in many respects the very mode) of a gener¬
ous and dutiful corporate citizen. In "commun¬
ity relations," in donations to colleges and uni¬
versities, In generous release of the time of its
employees for charitable and civic undertakings,
it la almost certainly the most public-spirited
corporation in America, and perhaps on the
face of the earth.

They have bean generous sbout many
public Interest projects, from Braille transcrip¬
tion to donating photographers and facilities for
films on child development.

The corporation sponsor* worthwhile cul¬
tural events. "Don Quixote” with Rex Harrison
on TV wsb terrific. Katharine Hepburn's "Glass
Menagerie" was marvelous.

They treet their small suppliers honorably
and with great solicitude.

IBM's enlightenment and benevolence
toward its employees Is perhaps bayond that of
any company anywhere They have rigorously
upgraded the position of women and other minor¬
ity employees; the opportunities for women may
be greater there than anywhere else. They have
upgraded repair of their systems, at any level,
to white-collar status, and tool kits are disguised
as briefcases. This innovation, making a repair¬
man into a "field engineer," Is one of the clever¬
est public-relations and employment policies ever
instituted.

They are openhanded to employees who
want to run for office, evidently regardless of
platform. In the sixties there were peace candi¬
dates who worked for IBM. and evidently got
time off for it. More recently. Fran Youngsteln.
an IBM marketing instructor, was a 1973 candi¬
date for Mayor of New York on the ticket of the
Free Libertarian Party, opposing all laws against
victimless crimes (e.g. prostitution and odd sex),
as well as Day Care and welfare.

TH£ &00>> AKlD

First , the good news

They offer msny computor pro¬
grams for ■ variety of purposes.

A company or governmental agency
can get immense amounts of "help"
and "information" from IBM. which
offers free courses, even IBM
people on "released time" to look
over the problem* on the premises.

IBM offers various kinds of com¬
patibility among its systems.

*!ewr fteoor i5*\

Now for the bad news ..

These programs are not necesearlly
set up the way you would wsnt them.
(But If you take the trouble to adapt
to them, you'll probably never get
back.)

The programs favor card or
card-Uke Input and. to date, strongly
discourage tlme-shsrlng and widespread
convenient terminal usa by untrained
people.

IBM programs are also notoriously
Inefficient, (That way you hsve to use
bigger machines for longer )

The courses indoctrinate with the IBM
outlook, and the planted people spread
It. Moreover, both mechanisms help
IBM spot the people they can work with
to make a big sale-- and [It Is alleged
by some) those who stand in (he wty.

It always seems to cost extra.

IBM equipment Is rugged and
durable, and their repairmen
or "field engineers" struggle
with great diligence and alacrity

to keep it running You may not like the way it runs.

They also rarely fire people. Once you're
in. and within certain broad outlines, it's ex¬
tremely safe employment. For those who turn
out not to fit In well, they have a tradition of
certain gentle pressure-practices like moving
you around the country repeatedly at IBM ex¬
pense. This encourages leaving, but also ex¬
poses the less-wanted employee to a variety of
opportunities he might not otherwise see. without
the trauma and anxiety of dismissal.

(It is said that there are IBM firings, but
they are rare and formidable. Heywood Gould's
description of an IBM firing ( Corporation Freak ,
pp. 113-115). for which he does not claim au¬
thenticity, is nevertheless bloodcurdling.)

IBM's International manners (in its 115
countries) are likewise praiseworthy. Compared
to the perfidious behavior of some of our other
multinational corporations, they are sweetness
and light and highschool civics. Sensitive to
the feelings of people abroad, they are said to
operate carefully within arrangements made to
satisfy each country. They tram nationals for
real corporate responsibility rather than bringing
in only outside people. And they are sensitive
to issues for instance, they recently refused to
set up an Apartheid computer in South Africa.

ONE THING IS PERFECTLY CLEAR:

IBM has no monopoly on understanding or sophistication.

THEN WHY SUCH A RANGE OF FEELINGS
TOWARD IBM?

Among computer people, feelings toward
IBM range from worship to furious hale (depen¬
ding only in part on whether you work there) .

Many, many are of course employed by
IBM. and the devotion with which they embrace
the corporation and its spirit is a wonder of the

1. SOCIAL ASPECTS OF IBM .

It is perhaps in the social realm, including
its Ideological character, that a lot of people
are turned off by IBM.

IBM ha* traditionally been the paternalistic
corporation. (Paternalistic corporations were
some kind of big philosophical issue to people
In the fifties, but nobody cares anymore. Anyway,
the rest were perhaps inconsequential compared
to IBM.) Big IBM towns not only have a Country
Club (no booze). but a Homestead for the comfort
of important corporate guests. There are dress
codes (although non-white shirts and below-the-
collar hair are now allowed) , and yes. codes
o( private behavior (now subdued) . These irritate
people with libertarian concerns. They do not
bother employees, evidently, because employees
knew what they were getting into.

Generalizations about IBM people obviously
cannot be very strong. Obviously there is going
to be immense variation among 26S.000 people,
half of whom have college degrees; but of course
one of the great truths of sociology Is that any
non-random group haa tendencies.

More than that In this case. In a way IBM
people are an ethnic group. Impressive indeed
are the general energy and singlemindedness
ot the people, galvanized by their certainty that
IBM is true, good and right, and that the IBM
way is the way. This righteousness is of course
a big turn-off for a lot of people. Perhaps It
leads in turn to the most-heard slurs about IBM
people, that they are brainwashed or provincial.

I$M dW<JT€iej- Wh (Ml let

But the spiritual community of IBM extends
further. Upper-management types. especially
Chairmen of Boards and comptrollers, seem to
have a reverence for IBM that is not of this
world, tome amalgamated vision which entwines
images of eternal stock and dividend growth
with an Idealized notion of management efficiency.
Many others use and live with IBM's equipment,
and view IBM as anything from "the greatest
company in the world" to "a fact of life" or even
"a necessary evil." In some places whole colo¬
nies of users mold themselves in its image, so
that around IBM computers there are many "Uttla
IBMs. “ full of people who imitate the personali¬
ties and style of IBM people. (RCA. before Its
computer operation fell to pieces. Imitated not
Just the design of IBM's 3G0 computer, but a
whole range of title* and departmental names
from out of IBM. The smeerest form of flattery.)

But outside Ihla pale-- beyond the spiri¬
tual community ol IBM-- there are quite a few
other computer people Some simply Ignore IBM.
being concerned with their own stuff Some
like IBM but happen to be elsewhere. Others
dislike or beta IBM for a variety of reasons,
business and social. And this smoldering
hatred 1* surely far different In character from
anybody's attituds toward Kodak or GM.

While it i* nut the Intent here to da any
kind of an anU-IBM number, it la neverthalas*
necessary to sllempt to round out the one-sided
picture that ia projected outside the computer
world. In what follow* there ia no room to try
to give a balanced picture. Because IBM can
apeak (or Itself, and does so with many volcaa.
It la more important to indlcets hers the kinds
at criticisms which ere commonly made of IBM
by sophisticated people within the industry, so
that IBM-worshipers will have some idea of what
bother* people. But of course no attempt can
be mad* here to judge these milters, this is
Just intended *e source material (or concerned
citizens

1950s (TUBES)

650 (DecimalJ 700 Series

701

702 (decimal) v
^ \l

70S (decimal) 704 (36 bit*)

EAHLY i960*
(TRANSISTORS!)

7070

7040

7090

1620

7074

7044

7094

(decimal
mlnlcom puter)

1400 senes (decimal.

/ STRETCH

accounting -or tented)

/ (64 bite)

1401. 1410.

Ne_

/ '

MID-1960S

(INTEGRATED

CIRCUITS]

310 Series

(32-bit *■ well ai decimal)

20. 25. 30. 40. 44. 50. 65. 67,
| 75. 65. 90. 91 .

1970a

("MEDIUM-SCALE

INTEGRATION")

(Variable)
Sye(em 7

(16 bits)

370 Serial

125. 135. 145. 155, 165. 156. 195.

The asm* elfck marketing could be tpplled to any other industry .
Bui It wouldn't be IBM Nowhere elec could the mystery of the subject
be mat end enhanced with so many more mysteries.

||oUJ (SM*)

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a ftR?pcdt'^e

Those of us who were around will never
forget the Days of Madness (1968-9). Computer
stocks were booming, and their buyers didn't
know what it was about; but everywhere there
were financial people trying to back new com¬
puter companies, and everywhere the smart
computer people who'd missed out on Getting
Theirs were looking for a deal.

Datama tion for November 1969 was an inch
thick. there were that many ads for computers
and accessories.

At the Fall Joint Computer Conference that
year in Las Vega6, I had to cover the highlights
of the exhibits in a hurry, and it took me all
afternoon, much of it practically at a trot. Then,
after closing time, I found out there had been
a whole other building .

It is important to look at how a lot of these
companies were backed, the better to understand
how irrationality bloomed in the system, and
made the collapse of the speculative stocks in
1970 quite inevitable.

It was very difficult to talk to these people,
jarticularly if you were trying to get support for
a legitimate enterprise built around unusual ideas.
(Everybody wants to be second .) And what's
worse, they tended to have that most reprehen¬
sible quality: they wouldn't listen . Did they
want to hear what your idea actually was ? 'Til
get my technical people to evaluate it"-- and
they send over Joe who once took COBOL. 1
finally figured out that such people are impossible
to talk to if you're sincere-- it's a quality they
find unfamiliar and threatening. I don't think
there's any way a person with a genuine idea
can communicate with such Wheeler-Dealers;
they just fix you with a piercing glance and say
"Yeah, but are we talking about hardware or
software?" (the two words they know in the
field).

A number of companies were started at
the initiative pi people who knew what they were
doing and had a clear idea, a new technique or
a good marketing slant. These were in the
minority, I fear.

More common were companies started at
the initiative of somebody who wanted to start
"another X"— another minicomputer company,
another terminal company, expecting the product
somehow to be satisfactory when thrown together
by hired help. Perhaps these people saw com¬
puter companies as something like gold mines,
putting out a common product with interchangeable
commodity value.

The deal, as some of these Wall St. hangers-
on would explain it, was most intriguing. Their
idea was to create a computer company on low
capital, "bring it public" (get clearance from the
SEC to sell stock publicly) , and then make a
killing as the sheep bought it and the price went
up. Then, if you could get a "track record"
based on a few fast sales, the increasing price
of your stock (these are the days of madness,
remember) makes it possible to buy up other
companies and become a conglomerate.

1*+" so* c

t &

. . cO* 9

, v®**

V* i

k *

“ITS A WHEELER I"

The joker is that if you missed out on all
this you were much better off. Anyone with a
genuine idea is being set up for two fleecings:
the first big one, when they tell you your ideas,
skills and long-term indenture are worth 2J%

(if you're lucky) compared to their immense con¬
tributions of "business knowhow," and the second,
when you go public and the underwriter gets
vast rakeoffs for his incomparable services. What
is most likely to get lost in all this is any orig¬
inal or structured contribution to the world that
the company was intended, in your mind, to
achieve.

This is all the sadder because the com¬
panies that achieve important things in this field,
as far as I can see, are those with a unifying
idea, carried out unstintingly by the man or
men who believe in it. I think of Olsen’s Digital
Equipment Corporation, Data General, Evans and
Sutherland Computer Corporation, Vector General.
This is not to say that a good idea succeeds
without good management or good breaks: for
instance, Viatron, a firm which was the darling
of the computer high-flying stocks, had a per¬
fectly sound idea, if not a deep one: to produce
a video terminal that could be sold for as little
as $100 a month. But they got overextended,
and had manufacturing troubles, and that was
that. (You can now get a video terminal for
$49 a month, the Hazeltine.) Of course, a lot
of ideas are hard to evaluate. A man named
Ovshinsky, for instance, named a whole new
branch of electronics after himself ("ovonics"),
and claimed it would make integrated circuits
cheaper or better than anybody else's. Scoff,
scoff. Now Ovshinsky has had the last laugh:
what he discovered some now call "amorphous
semiconductor technology," and his circuits are
being used by manufacturers of computer equip¬
ment. Another example is one Frank Marchuk,
whose "laser computer" was announced several
years ago but hasn't been seen yet. Many com¬
puter people are understandably skeptical.

This is still a field where individuals can
have a profound influence. But the wrong way
to try it is through conventional corporate fin¬
ancing. Get your own computer, do it in a
garret, and then talk about ways of getting it
out to the world.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

John Brooks, The Go-Go Years . Weybright
k Talley. $10.

¥•«, it*B real.
Life inirates art
on Route 46, N.J.

In part this is because anyone with tech¬
nical knowledge is apparently labelled Silly
Technician in the financial community, or impos¬
sible Dreamer; it is entrenched doctrine among
many people there that the man with the original
idea cannot be allowed to control the direction
of the resulting company. In one case known
to me, a man had a beautiful invention (not
electronic) that could have deeply improved
American industry. It was inexpensive, simple
to manufacture, profoundly effective. He made
his deal and the company was started, under
his direction. But it was a trick. When the
second installment of financing came due (not
the second round . mind you), the backers
called for a new deal, and he was skewered.
Result: no sales, no effect on the world, no
nothing to speak of.

/}<X 0 W

I s goufr^r ^Ij) jeep

For Ihe most part. h»*r computers have
always been rented or Irased. rather than
bought outright. There are various reasons for
this. From the customer’s point of view, it
makes the whole thing tax-deductible without
amortisation problems, and means that it’s pos¬
sible to change part of the package - the model
of computer or the accessories- more easily.

And big amounts of money don't have to be
shelled out at once.

From the manufacturer’* point of view (and
of courac we arc apeaking mostly of IBM), It Is
advantageous to work the leasing game for
several reasons. Cash inflow is steady. The
manufacturer la In continuous communication
with the customer, and has his ear for changes
and improvements costing more. Competitors
are at a disadvantage because the immense
capital baae needed to get into the selling-and-
leaalng game makes competitition impossible.

Basically. leasing really may be thought
of as having two parts: the sale of the computer,
and banking a loan on it: essentially Ihr lease
payments arc Installment payments, and the real
profits come sfter the customer has effectively
paid the real purchase price and is still forking
over.

Many firms other than IBM prefer to sell
their computers outright. Minicomputers are
almost always sold rather than rented. However,
for those who believe in renting or leasing, the
so-called "leasing firms" hsve appeared, effec¬
tively performing s banking function. They buy
the computer, you rent or lease it from them,
and they make the money you would've saved
if you'd bought.

IBM. now required lo sell its computers
as well as lesse them, keeps making changes
in ils systems which cynics think are done partly
to scare companies away from leasing, since
if you've bought the computer you can't catch up.
(Large computers bought from companies that
like (o sell them, such as DEC and CDC. do not
seem to have this problem.)

wt«, MTEMW

a practical probles of immense importance is "maintenance."
meaning repair and upkeep of computers and their accessories.
Lots of guys in Boston ond L.A, are having fun making computers,
but here you are stuck in Squeedunk and it doesn't work anymore.

Trying to find people who will fix these things on a stable
basis i* a great problem.

You can sign a "maintenance contract" with the sunufacturer,
which is sort of like breakdown insurance: whatever happen*
he'll fix. Eventually . If you own aquipnant from dlfferant
manufacturers, though. It's worse-, each manufacturer will only
contract to fix his own equipment. (And remember, interfaces
hsve to be maintained too.)

This is ths biggest point in favor of IBM. Their maintenance is
superb.

There's aleo something called third-party maintenance: companies
who'll contract to keep all your hardware-working. RCA and
Raytheon are into that.

SOFTWARE

Computer programs, or "software." used
10 come fr<c with the computer. But IBM turned
around and "unbundled," meaning you had lo
buy It separately, and there has been some fol¬
lowing of this example. However, for users who
are buying a computer with some canned program
for a particular purpose, prices are obviously
for the whole package: it'a people who use the
same computer for a lot of different things that
have to pay for individual programs.

There are many smell software companies.

For the cost of a letterhead anyone can alert one;
the question is whether he has anything special
lo sell. Some people whomp up programs on
their own which turn out to be quite useful.

(For instance, one Benjamin Pitman offers a
magnificent program in Fortran to generate tex¬
tual garbage. It's so good it can be used lo
expand proposals by hundreds of pages. He
calls it Simplified Integrated Modular Prose (SIMP)
and it sells for $10. His address is Computer
Center, University of Georgia, Athens GA 30602?)

Obviously, to create big systems for intri¬
cate management purposes requires a great deal
more effort. Traditionally these are done by
vast programmer teams working in COBOL or
the like, constantly fighting wiih monitor programs
and chewing up millions of dollars. However,
the new Quickie Languages (three shown pp. ((-£$)
may offer great simplification of such programming-
tasks.

Programs ore protected by copyright--
that's the only way there con be a software in¬
dustry at all-- but since there has been no
court litigation in Hie field, nobody knows what
the Iaw really is or what it covers. Everybody
agrees that traditional copyright precedent covers
a lot of ground-- "derivative works" definitely
violate copyright, even study guides to textbooks--
-- but no one knows how far this goes.

Same for patents. The Patent Office has
granted program patenls, notably the one on
the sorting program of Applied Data Research,

Inc., but The Patent Office has a profound dis¬
taste for this potential extension of ils duties,
and is Idling everyone that programs aren't
patentable, even though they clearly fall within
its mandate as unique, original processes.

People who only read the headlines thick
thal the Supreme Court struck down the patent¬
ability of programs. No such thing.

USED COMPUTERS

While In principle there would seem to be
every advantage in buying used computers, there
are certain drawback*. Service is the main one:
the manufacturer is not very helpful about fixing
discontinued machines, and you may have to know
how to do it yourself. Even with machines still
available, you may have trouble getting onto a
servfce contract from the manufacturer, since
It "may have been mistreated." (American Uaed
Computer, in Boaton, will usually guarantee
that its merchandise wiU be accepted back into
manufacturer's contract service.) A final draw¬
back i* price: a popular machine may coat aa
much used as new, since they're saving you the
waiting period.

It's kind of unfortunate: otherwise usable
machines get wasted. (Bui here's waste for
you: certain well-known laboratories, owned by
a profit-making monopoly, smash their used com¬
puters If nobody wants them within the lab.

They claim they can't resell them because they
would then be "competing" with the manufacturers.

1 wish thF conservationists would get on that one.)

(Notes from all over: il seems that all the
surviving number* of the Philco computer, a nice
machine but very much discontinued, have ei¬
ther gone to the state of Israel or to Pratt Insti¬
tute in Brooklyn. When 1 spoke at Pratt they
showed me their Philco machines, chugging heal¬
thily. and said they had (I think) some four more
Philcos in crates , donated by their original owners.)

ANNOUNCEMENTS

An eccentric aspect of the computer field
is the Announcement. Ihe statement by a company
(or even individual) that he is planning lo make
or sell a certain computer or program. Some
very odd things happen with announcements in
this field. (None of this is unique lo computer¬
dom, but it goes to unusual extremes here.)

Under our system it is permissible for any
person or firm to announce that he will make or
sell any particular thing, and even if he's lying
through his teeth, it’s not ordinarily considered
fraud unless money changes hands. Talk is
cheap. Thus il ia common practice in American
industry for people to say that they will soon
be selling hundred-mile-an-hour automobiles,
tapioca-powered rocketships. antigravity belts.

Okay. In the computer world the same
thing happens. The strategy depends on the
announcer's market position. The little guys
are often bluffing wistfully, hoping someone will
get interested enough lo put up the money to
finish the project, or the like; the big companies
are often "testing the water." looking to see
whether there sre potential customers for what
they haven't even attempted to develop. Announce¬
ments by big companies also have strategic value:
if they announce something a smaller guy has
already announced, they may cut him off at Ihe
pass, even though they have no intention of
delivering. That's just one example. The anal¬
ysis of IBM's announcements is a parlor game
in Hie field. It has been alleged, for instance,
that IBM announced its 360 computer long before
it was ready to cut off incurs ions on its cus¬
tomers by other firms; Control Dais, in a recent
suit, alleged that the Model 90 number* of the
360 were announced, and then developed, simply
to destroy Control Data and its own big fast
machines. These are just examples.

In olher words, caveat auditor ■

THE SEVEN DWARVES AND THEIR FRIENDS

The computer companies arc often
called "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves,"
even though the seven keep changing. Here
are some main ones beside IRM. 1 hope I

haven't left anyone out.

Requieacanl in Pace :

Sperry Rand Univac General Electric

Honeywell <«°M out to Honeywell)

Burroughs RCA (sold out to Univac)

Control Data Corporation (CDC) Philco

National Cash Register (NCR) General Poods

Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) * others beyond recollection

Xerox Data Systems (XDS; formerly
Scientific Data Syitems (SDS))

Hewlett-Packard (HP)

Data General
Interdata, Inc.

Vartan Data Machines
Lockheed

In this light the patents that the University
of Utah has gotten on (he halftone imago synthesis
programs of Warnock and Wylie and Romney (sec
p. ) are of considerable interest. These
patents use the "software-aa-hardware" ruse: the
program is described in detail aa taking place in
a fictitious machine shown in many detailed draw¬
ings whose nebulous character la not readily
acen by the uninitiated: events vaguely taking
place in "microprogrammable microprocessors"
have been neatly foisted on the Patent Office as
detailed technical disclosure. It’s a great game.
The idea is that the claims are so drawn as to
cover not just the fictitious machine, but any
program that should happen to work the same
way. But such approaches, though common to
previous,, patent practices, have not yet been
litigated in this, field.

Datamation ran several good articles on

buying computer stuff in it* Septem¬
ber. 15. 1970 issue.

"Software Buying" by Howard
Bromberg (35-40) and "Contract
Caveats" by Robert P. Bigelow (41-
44 ) are very helpful warnings about
not getting burned.

Another. "Project Management
Games." by Werner W. Leutert <24-
34 ) ia an absolutely brilliant, blood¬
curdling strategic analysis of the
ploy* and dangers involved in buy¬
ing and selling very expensive things,
such as computer* and software.
ANYONE INVOLVED IN COMPUTER
MANAGEMENT SHOULD READ THIS
MACHIAVELUAN PIECE WITH THE
GREATEST CARE. Anyone interes¬
ted In the theory of showdown and
negotiation can read it with a differ¬
ent slant.

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One of the stranger projects of the sixties was a game
played by the most illustrious programmers at a well-known
place of research; the place cannot be named here, nor
the true name of the project, because funds were obtained
through sober channels, and those who approved were
unaware of the true nature of the project, a game we shall
call SURFIT ("SURvival of the FITtest".) Every day after
lunch the guys would solemnly deliver their programs and
see who won. It was a sort of analogy to biological evolution.
The programs would attack each other, and the survivors
would multiply until only pne was left.

It worked like this. Core memory was divided up
into "pensone for each programmer, plus an area for
the monitor.

a*\i

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Vs S S y
////

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jwrr K\omrc><?

Each program, or "animal," could be loaded anywhere
in its pen. The other programs knew the size of the pen
but not where the animal was in it. Under supervision
of the special monitor, the animals could by turns bite
into the other pens, meaning that the contents of core at
several consecutive locations in the other pen was brought
back, and changed to zero in its original pen.

Your animal could then "digest"— that is, analyze—
the contents bitten. Then the other animal got his turn.

If he was still alive— that is, if the program could still
function— it could stay in play; otherwise the animal who
had bitten it to death could multiply itself into the other
pen.

The winner was the guy whose animal occupied all
pens at the end of the run. If he won several times in a
row he had to reveal how his program worked.

As the game went on, more and more sophistication
was poured into the analytic routines, whereby the animal
analyzed the program that was its victim; so the programmer
could attack better next time. The programs got bigger
and bigger.

Finally the game came to a close. A creature emerged
who could not be beaten. The programmer had reinvented
the germ. His winning creature was all teeth , with no
diagnostic routines; and the first thing it did was multiply
itself through the entirety of its own pen, assuring that
no matter where it might just have been bitten, it would
survive.

OTY&K.

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MTOt Kill.

C.ANWOT J0*V|V6,

P/X"

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c o *“plet*_ ok.tJj

arre*. *nx

m m i 11

frFTltt

□ 11 m i n

When word got around that this nude was in a public file on the
time-sharing system, my office-mates scrambled to get printouts of her.
The cleverest, though, had a deck punched . As he predicted, she was
thrown off by the systems people within an hour or so-- leaving the other
guys with their printouts, but he had the deck. Now he can put her
back in the computer any time, but they can't.

l l

: i |

-s

i “

ill

Twitting a program within its own premises
is a jolly aspect of computer fun. This game of
three-dimensional tic-tac-toe was played with a
program running on a minicomputer at the Spring
Joint, 1969. CAUTION--ADULTS ONLY. ®
While this example may offend some people,
it vividly showB how programs may be toyed with
-- in this case, by the mischievous sign-on--
to make them behave humorously.

1. THE PHANTOM STRIKES

C^M0TtiL_

All kind* of dumb Jokes and cartoons circulate among
the public about computers. Then our friends regale us
contputerfolk with these Jokes and cartoons, and because
we don't laugh they say we have no sense of humor.

Oh we do. we do. But what we laugh at ie rather
more complicated, and relates to what we think of as the
real structure of things.

Some of the best humor in the field is run in Datamation ;
an anthology called Faith . Hope and Parity reran a lot of
their best pieces from the early sixties. Classic was the
Kludge aeries, a romp describing various activities and
products of the Kludge Komputer Korporation, whose foibles
distilled many of the more idiotic things that have been
done in the field. ("Kludge," pronounced "kloojis a
computerman's term for a ridiculous machine.) Datamation’s
humorous tradition has continued in a ponderous but extremely
funny serial that ran in '72 called Also Sprach von Neumann .
which in mellifluous and elliptical euphemisms described
the author's adventures at the "airship foundry" and other
confused companies that had him doing one preposterous
thing with computers after another.

(ioKtoTE^mviia

Pranks are an important branch of humor in the field.
Here are some that will give you a sense of it.

ZAP THE 94

One of the meaner pranks was a program that ran
on the old 7094. It could fit on one card (in binary), and
put the computer in an inescapable loop. Unfortunately
the usual "STOP" button was disabled by this program,
so to stop the program one would eventually have to pul)
the big emergency button. This burnt out all the main
registers.

TIMES SQUARE LIGHTS

One of the weirder programs was the operator-waker-
upper somebody wrote for the 7094. It was a big program,
and what it did was DISPLAY ALPHABETICAL MESSAGES
ON THE CONSOLE LIGHTS. sliding past like the news in
Times Square. You put in this program and followed It
with the message; the computer’s console board would light
up and the news would go by. Since the lights usually
blink in uninteresting patterns, this was very startling.

This program was extremely complex. Since the
94 displayed the contents of all main registers and trap,
arithmetic and overflow lights, it was necessary to do very
weird things in the program to turn these lights on and
off at the right times.

THE TIME-WASTER

In one company, for some reason, it was arranged
that large and long-running programs had priority over
abort quick ones. Very well: someone wrote a counterattack
program occuping several boxes of punch cards, to which
you added the short program you really wanted run, and
a card specifying how long you wanted the first part of
the program to grind before your real one actually started.

This would blink lights and spin tapes impressively
and lengthen the run of your program to whatever' you wanted.

BOMBING THE TIME SHARE

One of the classic bad-boy pranks is to bomb time¬
sharing systems-- that la, foul them up and bring them to
a halt. Many programmers have done this; one has told
me it's a wonderful way to get rid of your aggressions.

Of course. it can damage other people's work (eepeclally
If disks are bombed); and it alwaye gats the system program¬
mers hopping mad, because it means you've defied their
authority and maybe found a hole they don't know about.

Here are a couple of examole*.

The way this story is told, one of the time-sharing
systems at MIT would go down at completely mysterious
times, with all of core and disk being wiped out. and
the lineprinter printing out THE PHANTOM STRIKES.

For a long time the guilty program could not be
found. Finally it was discovered that the bomb was
hidden in an old and venerable statistics program
previously believed to be completely reliable. The
reason the phantom didn’t always strike was that the
Bomb part queried the system clock and made a pseudo¬
random decision whether to bomb the system depending
on the instantaneous setting of the clock. This is why
it took so long to discover; the program usually bided
Its time and behaved properly.

Apparently this was the revenge of a disgruntled
programmer, long since departed. Not only that, but
his revenge was thorough: the Bomb part of the program
was totally knifed into the rest of it, it was a very
important program that had to be run a lot with different
data, end no documentation existed, making it for
practical purposes impossible to change.

The final solution, so the story goes, was this:
whenever the rowdy program had to be run, the rest
of the machine was cleared or put on protect. so it ran
and had its fits in majestic solitude.

2. RHBOMB

The time-share at the Labs, never mind which
Labs, kept going down. Mischief was suspected. Mis¬
chief was verified: a program called RHBOMB. sub¬
mitted by a certain programmer with the initials R.H.,
was responsible, and turned out always to be present
when the terminals printed TSS HAS GONE DOWN. It
was verified by the systems people that the program
celled RHBOMB was in fact a Bomb program, with no
other purpose than to take down the time-sharing system.

R.H. was spoken to sternly and it did not hap¬
pen again.

However, some months later a snoopy systems
programmer noted that a file called RHBOMB had been
stored on disk. Rather than have R.H. scalped pre¬
maturely. he thought he would check the contents.

He sat down at the terminal and typed in the com¬
mand, PRINT RHBOMB. But before he could see its
contents, the terminal typed instead

TSS HAS GONE DOWN

But this was incredible! A program so virulent that
if you just tried to read its contents , without running
it, it still bombed the system! The systems man
rushed from the room to see what had gone wrong.

He did so prematurely. The contents of the
new file RHBOMB were simply

TSS HAS GONE DOWN

followed by thousands of null codes, which were sil¬
ently being fed to the Teletype, 10 per second, pre¬
venting it from signalling that it was ready for the
next thing.

Owl* Gw of m

A Grand Fad among computerfolk in the last couple
of years has been the game of "Life,” invented by John
Horton Conway.

The rates appeared in the Scientific American in
October 1970, in Martin Gardner's games column, and the
whole country went wild . Gardner was swamped with
results (many published in Feb. 71); after a couple more
issues Gardner washed his hands of it, and It goes on
in its own magazine .

The game is a strange model of evolution, natural
selection, quantum mechanics or pretty much whatever
else you want to see in it. Part of its initial fascination
was that Conway didn't know its long-term outcomes, and
held a contest (eventually won by a group from MIT).

The rules are deceptively simple: suppose you have
a big checkerboard. Each cell has eight neighbors: the
cells next to It up, down and diagonally.

Time flows in the game by "generations." The pattern
on the board in each generation determines the pattern
on the board in the next generation. The game part simply
consists of trying out new patterns and seeing what things
result in the generations after it. Each cell is either OCCUPIED
or EMPTY . A cell becomes occupied (or "is born") if exactly
three of its neighbors were full in the previous generation.

A cell stays occupied if either two or three of its neighbors
were occupied in the previous generation. All other cells
become empty ("die").

These rules have the following general effect: patterns
you make will change, repeat, grow, disappear in wild
combinations. Some patterns move across the screen in
succeeding generations ("gliders”). Other patterns pulsate
strangely and eject gliders repetitively (glider guns).

Some patterns crash together in ways that produce moving
glider guns. Weird.

While the game of Life, as you can see from the rules,
has nothing to do with computers intrinsically, obviously
computers are the only way to try out complex patterns
in a reasonable length of time.

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NON-OBVIOUS RESULTS OF SOME SIMPLE PATTERNS:

some die. one blinks back and forth, others become stable.
(Conway's Game of Life programmed for PLATO by Danny Sleator.)

Games with computer programs are universally enjoyed
in the computer community . Wherever there are graphic
displays there ia usually a version of the game Spacewar.

(flee Steward Brand's Spacewar piece in Rolling Stone ,
mentioned elsewhere.) Spacewar. like many other computer-
based games, is played between people , using the computer
as an animated board which can work out the reaulta of
complex rules.

Some installations have computer games you can play
a gain at ; you are effectively "playing against the house,"
trying to outfox a program. Thia ia rarely eaay . A variety
of techniques, hidden from you, can be used.

When "a computer" plays a game, actually somebody's
program la carrying out a set of rules that the programmer
has laid out In advance. The program has a natural edge;
it can check a much longer serlea of possibilities In looking
for the best move (according to the criteria in the program).

There la • more complicated approach: the computer
can be programmed to test for the best strategy in a game.

This is much more complicated, and is ordinarily considered
an example of "artificial intelligence” (see ”The God-Builders,"
eleewhere in thia book) .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Donpld D. Spencer, Game Playing with Combers.
(Spartan/Hayden. $13.) This includes flow¬
charts, programs and what-have-you for some
25 games, and suggestions for more.

A continuing scries of game programs (mostly or
all in BASIC) appears in PCC. a newspaper
mentioned earlier.

Stewart Brand's msrvelous Spacewar piece, also
mentioned earlier, ia highly recommended.

*rt C. Ganwill, "hn examination of Tlc-T*c-Toe-
llkn Ganme." Proc. NCC 74 , 349 - 355 .

Examines structure of simple
(up, jo tic-tec-toe or CUBIC) where forced
ulna are possible* and pro<jra* structures to
play them.

( Lifeline , »ald to be published by Bobert T.
isinwriflht of Wilton, Connecticut.)

THMe M>0RM5ie

lUFORiMTNfr

Thrir name makes people think they're a mar protest fjroup.
but actually the R .E .S .1 .S .T .O .R .S . of Princeton , N .J. sre n
bunch of kids who play with computers. They're oil young; members
are purged when they finish high school. Their elubroom is at
Princeton University, but the initiative is strictly theirs.

The name stands for "Radically Emphatic Students Interested
In Science. Technology and Other Research Subjects." Computers
are not all they do--they've also gotten Into slot racing and the
game of Diplomacy— but computers are what they're known for.

The Resistors (let's spell ft the short way) exhibit regularly at
the computer conferences, and have startled numerous people
with the high quality of their work. They’ve been invited to various
conferences abroad. They have built various language processors
snd done graphics; lately their fad ia working with the LDS-I
in Princeton's Chemistry Department.

Stave

at the old
•traight S.

• *• '■»* -

•^4, *

Where do they learn it all? They leach each other, of course.
Newcomers hang around, learn computer talk, work on projects .
and tease each other. They also use the informal trade channels,
subscribing to magazines and filling out information request
cards under such company names as Plebney International Signal
Diviaion and Excalibur Wax Fruit.

The great thing about these kids ia their zany flippancy.
They've never failed, they’ve never been afraid for their jobs,
and so they combine the zest of the young with their expertise.
Their forms of expression arc as startling to professionals as
they are to outsiders: don't say anything ponderously if it can
be said playfully. Don’t Bay "bit field" if you can say "funny
bits;" don’t say "alphanumeric buffer" if you can say "quick brown
fox box; " don't say "interrupt signal" if you can call it a "Hey
Charlie; " don't say "readdressing logic” if you can say "whoopee

What's a

group Like you

Joint ILka this?

They have varied backgrounds. The father of one Is a butcher,
the father of another Is one of the country's foremost intellectuals
(None of that matters to the kids.) 1 have dined in a number ol
their homes, and find this in common: their parents show them
great respect, love and trust. Indeed, Resistor parents have
expressed some surprise to learn that their children's work Is
at the full-fledged professional level. The important thing, to
7.'. ,he parents, is that the kids arc working on constructing things
•** they enjoy.

R.B.S.I.S.T.O.ft.S.
after infamous
Onega ceremony.

The trade press is ambivalent toward the Resistors. On
the one hand they make good copy. (At one Spring Joint they
had the only working time-sharing demo-- on a carpel next to
a phone booth.) On the other, they sometimes seem brntty and
publicity-hungry . like many celebrities. (At another Spring
Joint they dug up an IBM Songbook and serenaded the guys ut
the IBM pavilion, who hud to act nice about it.) So they don't
get written up in computer magazines so much anymore.

I first met the Resistors in 1970. and started hanging around
with them for two reasons. First, they ore perfectly dclighirul:
enthusiastic in the way that most adults forego, and very witty.

To them computer talk was not a thing apart, us it is for both out¬
siders and many professionals.

Secondly, and this was the self-seeking aspect, I noted
that these kids were quite expert, and interested in giving me
advice where computer professionals would not. They got interested
in helping me with my (perhaps quixolic) Xanadu lm project (sec
flip side). This was enough to keep mo visiting for a couple of
years. Now. some people arc too proud lo ask children for informa-
lion. This is dumb. Information is where you find it.

The lost I heard, the Resistors were ut work in u COBOL
compiler for the Pl)l'-11. hoping it would save the local high school
from the disastrous (to them) purchase of on IBM 1130. (Since
the school's intent was lo teach business programming, ihcy hoped
that the ovuilability of COBOL would encourage the school to buy
the more powerful and less expensive PDP-11.)

The Resistors arc few, but I think they urc very important
in principle, on cxislcncc proor. They show how silly and tirlificial
is our edifice of pedagogy . with ull its sequences and sterilizations,
and how anybody can learn anything in the right atmosphere,
stripped of its pomposities. The Resistors arc not obsessed with
computers; their love of computers is part of their love of everything,
and everything is whut computers arc for.

R.«.iJ.T.o.iy. 1,7

__' W,U " n ' ,4 ‘ talkl "« ln an »'har girl at (he ACM 70 con¬
ference. A passerby heard her explaining the differences amon*
the languages BASIC. FORTRAN. COBOL and TRAC "HowTZ

h " M "■ -o".

wiitioujuury urnring u.

A x;:zr ,he *«**«

rigni right away,” Mid a

Since there was a lot ..t .-xc ss capacity . the Resistors got
t free account on ■ national lime-sharing system. Though they
didn't have to pay, the system kept them Informed on what they
would have owed. In a year or so they ran up funny-money bills
of several hundred thousand dollars.

Did they rate free subscriptions to computer magazines?

I asked. Could they claim they really "make decisions affecting
the purchase of computers"?

"Of course we do!" was the reply. "All together: shall
we buy a computer?"

Resistors (in unison) "NO!”

Their original advisor, whom we shall call Gascon, is mis¬
chievous in his own right. It was meeting-time at Gaston's place
on a bright Saturday, and I was on the fawn working on Xanadu
with Nat and Elliott when Gaston interrupted lo say that an unwelcome
salesman of burg lar alarms was about to arrive. "Let's have
a little fun with him." said Gaston. The kids were to be introduced
as Gaston's children, 1 was an uncle. We took our stations.

The salesman may have realized he was walking into a (rap
from all the strangely beaming adolescents that stood in the living
room. He got out his wares and started to demonstrate the burglar
alarm, but it didn't go right. Peter, standing in front of the equip¬
ment with a demonically vacuous grin, had reversed o diode behind
his back so that the alarm rang continuously unless you broke
the light beam.

"Humpf." said Gaston, "you went to see a real security
system?" We trooped into the kitchen, where Gaston kept * Teletype
running.

ANY NEWS? typed Gaston.

CREAM YELLOW BUICK PULLED INTO DRIVEWAY, replied
the Telelype. JERSEY LICENSE PLATF. . . . (and the salesman's
license number). and finally . OWNER OF RECORD NOT KNOWN .
John was typing this from the other Teletype in the barn.

The salesman stored at the Tclotypo. He looked around
at our cherubic smiling faces. He looked at the Teletype. "That's
all right,” said the salesman. "But now I'd like to show you a
real scour ily system. . ." And it was back to the old burglar
ala rm.

WRITER P iPDKeSMe/tf

The public is thoroughly confused about
computers, and the press and publicists are
scarcely free from blame. IT'S TIME FOR EX¬
PLANATIONS. People want to know what computer
syst'ems really do-- no more of this "latest
sptce-age technology" garbage. Mr. Business¬
man, Mr. Writer, are you man enough to start
telling it straight?

The computer priesthood, unfortunately,
often wants to awe people with, or unduly
stress, the notion of the computer being in¬
volved in a particular thing at all. It is
time for everybody to stop being impressed by
this and get on with things. Don't just copy-
edit what they give you. Nose around and
really find out, then write it loud and clear.

These Simple rules are ny suggestions for
bringing on more intelligent descriptions
that will help enlighten the public by osmosis.

1. FIND OUT AND DESCRIBE THE FUNDAMEN¬
TAL APPROACH AND PHILOSOPHY OF THE PROGRAM.

This can invariably be stated in three clear
English sentences or less, but not necessarily
by the peTson who created it. THIS IS WHAT
WRITERS ARE FOR: it is your duty to probe un¬
til the matter has become clear.

Examples .

4. Attempt to find out how else computers
are used in the particular area, and mention
these to help orient the reader.

This goes against the cxclusivist tenden¬
cies we all have when we want to ballyhoo
something. It is a matter of conscience, an
important one.

5. Questions to ask:

What are the premises of your pro¬
gram?

what if people turn out to need
something else?

What could go wrong?

And most important: What is that ?
IMPORTANT DISTINCTIONS

It is only by clarifying distinctions
that people are ever going to get anything
straight.

6 . Do not say "the computer" when you
mean "the system" or "the program,"

7. Don’t say "a malfunctioning computer”
(hardware error) if the computer functioned

as it was directed on an incorrect program
(software error). (And remember that the
best programmers make mistakes, so that a
catastrophic bug in a system is no sign that
it was programmed by an incompetent, only
that it isn't finished.)

deeply versed in computers or software, not
just a programmer. (Anyway, if something has
been programmed by an entomologist, it is
probably more interesting to refer to him as
an entomologist than as a "computer scientist.")

14. Do not refer to apparent intelligence
of the computer (unless that is an intended
feature of the program). Credit rather the in¬
genuity of the system’s creator. Do not say
"the clever computer." If anybody is clever

it is the programmer or program designer, and
if you think so, say so. These guys don't get
the recognition they deserve,

15. Never, never say "teach the computer"
as an elliptical way of saying "write computer
programs." Programming means creating exact
and specific plans that can be automatically
followed by the equipment. To say "teach" when
you mean "program" is like "persuading" a car
instead of driving it, or making a toilet "cry"
instead of flushing it,

(There are systems, described on the flip
side, which simulate intelligent processes and
may thus be said to "learn" or "be taught.”

But neither programming nor simulated learning
should be described in a slipshod fashion that
suggests the computer is some sort of trainable
baby, puppy or demon.)

16. Do not imply that something is "the
last word,” unless you have checked that it is.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

"This chess-playing program evaluates
possible moves in terms of various criteria
for partial success, and makes the move which
has the highest merit according to these
ratings."

"This music-composing program operates
on a semi-random basis, screening possible
notes for various kinds of attractiveness..."

"This archaeological cataloguing system
keeps track of a variety of objective features
of each artifact, plus information on where
it was, Including linkages indicating What
other artifacts were near it."

What or whose computer is used to do a
thing is of almost no concern (unless it is
one of unusual design, of which there are com¬
paratively few). Not the make of the compu¬
ter, but the GENERAL IDEA OF HOW THE PROCRAM
OPERATES, is the most important thing.

Of course, if you are being paid by a
hardware manufacturer, you'll have to name the
equipment over and over; but recognize that
y° ur 1* public understanding, and

put the facts across. (If you think It can't
be dona, read the splendid Kodak ada in the
Scientific American .)

l. Keep gee-whizzing restricted to the
description of a system's psychological effect
on real people. (What impresses you may turn
out to be old hat.) *—

3. Look for angles special to what you're
reporting. Pursuing details is likely to
bring up better story pegs and more human In¬
terest. Instead of saying "computer scientists"
have done something, you might find something
more Interesting for your lead; how about "The
unlikely team of a biophysicist and a teen-age
art student..." or-- finding what's special--
"Never before has this been done on a computer
so small, the size of a portable typewriter
(and having only some 4000 words of menory),,."

6 . (A particular point about graphics.
See flip side.) Don't say "TV screen" if a
computer screen is not TV, i.e,, S2S hori-
tontal lines that you can see on the screen
if you look for them. (See p.>*\i versus p.

HOW ABOUT: "visual display screen"
-- ydu can add, "on which the computer can
draw moving lines," or whatever else the
particular system does.

9. Don’t assume that your audionce is
computer-illiterate.

10. Don't assume that it can't all be
said simply. Only lazy or hard-pressetTwriters
are unclear.

11. Do not use cutesy-talk, particular
that which suggests that computers have an in¬
trinsic character. By "cutesy" I mean sen¬
tences like "Scientists have recently taught

a computer to play chess," Mis-Leads like
"What does a computer sound like?" (when talk¬
ing about music constructed by a particular
program in a particular way), and awe-struck
descriptions like, "At last the Space Age has
coma to the real estate business..."

12. Do not use the garbage term "compu¬
terized," unless there is a clear statement
of whore the computer is In the system, what
the computer is doing and how. A "computer¬
ized traffic system," for instance, could be
any damn thing, but a "system of traffic lights
under computer control, using various timing
techniques still under development," says
something.

13. Don't put in cliches as fact, for
example by the use &f such tena* aa "mathe¬
matical" or "computer scientist" unless they
really apply. Do not imply any mathematical
character unless you know the system possesses
it: many programs contain no operations that
can fairly be called mathematical. Similarly,
a "computer scientist" is someone widoly or

Ernest Gowers, Plain Words .

This wonderful little book showed
English civil Jervant* "bureaucratic
writing" was totally unnecessary. Its
precepts-- mainly concerned with calling
a spade a spade (see p. (1-)-- transpose
exactly to the computer world.

Ml HCARTS *Uj>WUDS
0 F People

Computer people are a mystery to others,
who see them as somewhat frightening, somewhat
ridiculous. Their concerns seea so peculiar,
their hours so bizarre, their language so in-
coaprehensible.

Computer people nay best be thought of
as a new ethnic group, very auch unto then-
selves. Now, it is very hard to characterize
ethnic groups in words, and certain to give
offense, but if I had to choose one word for
then it would be elfin . We are like those
little people down anong the nushrooas, skit¬
tering around completely preoccupied with
unfathomable concerns and seemingly indif¬
ferent to normal humanity. In the moonlight
(i.e., pretty late, with snacks around the
equipment) you may hear our music.

Practice saying then loudly and firmly to
yourself. That way you won't freeze
when they're pulled on you.

THAT’S NOT HOW YOU DO IT

THAT'S NOT HOW YOU USE COMPUTERS

THAT'S NOT WHAT YOU DO WITH COMPUTERS

THAT'S NOT HOW IT’S DONE

THAT'S NOT PRACTICAL

HOW MUCH DO YOU KNOW ABOUT COMPUTERS?

WITH YOUR BACKGROUND,

YOU COULDN'T UNDERSTAND IT
LET'S CALL IN SOMEONE WHO KNOWS THIS
APPLICATION (generally a shill)

IT ISN'T DONE

(you know the answer to that one)
and the one I've been waiting tb hear,

IF GOD HAD INTENDED COMPUTERS TO BE USED
THAT WAY, HE WOULD HAVE DESIGNED
THEM DIFFERENTLY.

Most importantly, the first rule in deal¬
ing with leprechauns applies ex hypotheai to
computer people: when one promisesto do you
a magical favor, keep your eyes fixed on him
until he has delivered" Or you will geT what
you Reserve. Programmers' promises are notor¬
iously unkept.

Unfortunately there is no room here to
coach you on how to reply to all these. Be
assured that there is always a reply. The
brute-force brazen comeback, equally dirty,
is just to say something like

DIDN'T YOU SEE THE LAST JOINT PROCEEDINGS?

But the dippy glories of this world, the
earnestness and whimsy, are something else.

A real computer fre»k, if you ask him for a
program to print calendars, will write a pro¬
gram that gives you your choice of Gregorian,
Julian, Old Russian and French Revolutionary,
in either small reference printouts or big
ones you can write in.

OH YEAH7 WHAT ABOUT THE x WORK
USING A y?

(where x is anyplace on the map on p. fT
and y is any current computer, such as a
PDP-10 .)

Computer people have many ordinary traits
that show up in extraordinary ways-- loyalty,
pride, temper, vengefulness and so on. They
have particular qualities, as well, of dogged¬
ness and constrained fantasy that enable them
to produce in their work. (Once at lunch 1
asked a tablefull of programmers what plane
figures they could get out of one cut through
a cube. 1 got about three times as many ans¬
wers .as I thought there were.)

Unfortunately there is no room or time
to go on about all these things-- see Biblio¬
graphy-- but in this particular area of fan¬
tasy and emotion I have observed some interes¬
ting things.

One common trait of our times-- the tech¬
nique of obscuring oneself-- may be more com¬
mon among computer people than others (see
"The Myth of the Machine," p. ? , and also

"Cybercrud,” p. $ ). Perhaps a certain dis-

gruntlement with the world of people fuses
with fascination for (and envy of?) machines.
Anyway, m»ny of us who have gotten along badly
with people find here a realm of abstractions
to invent and choreograph, privately and with
continuing control. A strange house for the
emotions, this. Like Hegel, who became most
eloquent and ardent when he was lecturing at
his most theoretical, it is interesting to be
among computer freaks boisterously explaining
the cross-tangled ramifications of some system
they have seen or would like to build.

(A syndrome to ponder. I have seen it
more than once: the Technical person who, with
someone he cares about, cannot stop talking
about his ideas for a project. A poignant
type of Freudian displacement.)

A sad aspect of this, incidentally, is by
no means obvious. This is that the same com¬
puter folks who chatter eloquently about sys¬
tems that fascinate them tend to fall dark and
silent while someone else is expounding his own
fascinations. You would expect that the person
with effulgent technical enthusiasms would
really click with kindred spirits. In my ex¬
perience this only happens briefly: hostili¬
ties and disagreements boil out of nowhere to
cut the good mood. My only conclusion is that
the same spirit that originally drives us mut¬
tering into the clockwork feels threatened
when others start monkeying with what has been
controlled and private fantasy.

This can be summed up as follows: NOBODY
WANTS TO HEAR ABOUT ANOTHER GUY'S SYSTEM.

Here as elsewhere, things fuse to block human
communication: envy, dislike of being domina¬
ted, refusal to relate emotionally, and what¬
ever else. Whatever computer people hear
about, it seems they immediately try to top.

Which is not to say that computer people
are mere clockwork lemons or Bettelheimian
robot-children. But the tendencies are there.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

... programmers. in my experience.
tend to be painstaking, logical,
inhibited, cautious, restrained,
defensive, methodical, and ritualistic."

Ken Knowlton.

"Collaborations with Artists--

A Programmer’s Reflections."
in Nake a Rosenfeld (eds.).

Graphic Languages

(North-Holiand Pub. Co.), p. 399.

USEFUL. AND POSSIBLY EMBARRASSING QUESTIONS

If the Computer Priests start to pick on you,
here are some helpful phrases that will give you
strength.

I do not want to give the impression that the
Guardians of the Machine are always bad guys.
Nevertheless, sad to relate, they are not always
good guys. Like everyone out to bolster his position,
including the plumber and the electrician, the computer-
man has learned how easy it is to intimidate the layman.

Now, these people are often right. But if
you have reason to question the way things are done--
whether you're a member of the same corporation,
a consumer advocate or whatever-- you are probably
entitled to straight answers that will help settle the
matter honestly, without putdowns. Any honest

Now, these helpful questions, honestly answered,
may elicit long mysterious answers. Be patient
and confident . Write down what's said and sit down
with the glossary in this book until you understand
the answer. Then you can ask more questions.

1 am not inviting the reader to make trouble
flippantly. I am suggesting that many people have
a right to know which ha* not been exercised, and
there may be some discomfort at first.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

(This question may have to be backed
up as follows: "There are no computer systems
whose workings cannot be clearly described
to someone who understands the basics. I
INSIST THAT YOU MAKE A SINCERE ATTEMPT.')
WHY DO YOU CLAIM IT HAS TO BE THIS WAY?

(SPEAK MORE SLOWLY , PLEASE.)

WHAT IS THE DATA STRUCTURE?

COULD YOU EXPLAIN THAT IN TERMS OF THE DATA
STRUCTURE?

WHO DESIGNED THIS DATA STRUCTURE?

Gerald M. Weinberg, The Psychology of Computer
Programming . VazTNSTtranj RiiHKoTH. 1

veil

Sysi

itic treatment in a related

This case is so classic it's almost a Punch
and Judy show.

And can 1 talk to him?

WHAT IS THE ALGORITHM?

WHO IS THE PROGRAMMER?

And can 1 talk to him?

WHY DO WE HAVE TO USE A CANNED PROGRAM FOR
THIS?

WHY IS THE INPUT LANGUAGE SO COMPLICATED?

WHY DO WE NEED CARDS? WHY CAN’T PEOPLE TYPE
IN THEIR OWN INPUT?

WHY NOT HAVE A SIMPLE-MINDED FRONT END THAT
LETS USERS CONTROL IT THEMSELVES?

WHY HAVE FORMS TO FILL OUT? WHY NOT HAVE
A DIALOGUE FRONT-END ON A MINI?

WHY CAN'T IT BE ON-LINE? OCTI*** A aft (if aa. 7

WHY DOES IT HAVE TO BE THAT BRAND OF COMPUTER?

WHY NOT GET A SYSTEM WITH LESS OVERHEAD?

WHY SHOULD ALL COMPUTER OPERATIONS BE CENTRALIZED?

DON'T THEY GET IN EACH OTHER’S WAY?

WHY DOES IT ALL HAVE TO BE ON ONE COMPUTER?

WHY NOT PUT PART OF IT ON A DEDICATED MINI?

WHY CAN’T WE DO THIS PARTICULAR THING ALL
ON A MINI?

WOULDN'T IT COST LESS IF WE GOT A MINICOMPUTER
FOR THIS TASK?

WHY CAN’T THIS BE PROGRAMMED IN SOME LANCUACE
LIKE BASIC?

YOU KNOW AND I KNOW THAT COMPUTERS DON*T
HAVE TO WORK THAT WAY . WHY DO YOU CHOOSE
TO DO IT THAT WAY?

If these suggestions seem unnecessarily contentious,
it is because some of these guys like to pick on people,
and you may have to be ready. And you may need
all the support you can get, if. say, you take a stand
like one of three:

"If the informaUon is In there, I don't see why
we can’t get it out. "

"You have no right to ask questions like this,
and If the program requires it, change the program."

Remember , 1LLEOITIMIS NON CARBORUNDUM
(don't let the baetarda grind you down)

"For ns it always cow* do.
challenge: not Juat to errata a
the specifications, but to do it
find aesthetically pleasing."

« personal
as that aeet i
way that I

Robert H. Jones IV.
a heevy programmer at Chrysler

hfe50HT»oM

K Very important kind of discussion takes
place between people who want computer programs,
but can’t write them, end people who can write
them, but don't want to. Or, that la, who don’t
want to get caught having to do a lot of unneces¬
sary work if it could be done more simply.

the progr

cam negotiation , then, i* where
*— he may actually be the boss-
program that will do so-and-so,
aeseer says, "I'd rather do it tb

says,
’and
» way."

In a series of requests and counter-offers
the customer explains what he wants and the pro¬
grammer explains why he would rather do it a dif¬
ferent way. £t U essential for both sides to
■»*» themselves completely clear . Often the~us-
* Gft er thinks he wants one thing but would be
quite satisfied with another that is much easier
to program, often the programmer can make help-
ful auggeatione of better way* to do it that will
be easier for him.

Very bad things can happen if program nego¬
tiation it not done carefully and honestly enough.
The programer can misunderstand and create sou¬
thing that was not wanted, or the customer can
carelessly misstate himself and ask for the wrong
thing. Or worst of all— the prograamwr can de¬
liberately mishear end do something different,
saying, "There, that’s what you wanted," as he
hand* over something that isn't what was really
asked for. And the poor customer may even believe
it (see "Cybercrud," p. 1 ).

Program negotiation should be more widely
acknowledged as a difficult and painful businats.
It is exhausting and fraught with stress: people
(on both sides) get all kinds of psychosematic
symptom* (like abdominal pains, tics and chill*).
The fact that people's careers often depend on
the outcome makes the atmosphere worse, rather
than fostering the thorough and sympathet .1 c coop¬
eration which is essential.

If there is one thing that laymen in business
should be taught about computing, this is it.

THE HEFTING OP THE MINOS

The Customer,

Naive Advocate

I don’t see why
since it's e computer...

These are not detaile
that concern me..,

Theee are just
technical issues...

1 swan a computer
can do all these things.

The "Expert”

-C

What you’ve gotta
understand Is that there
ere problems involved...

way■..

Leave it to me, it’ll
be juat what you want...

Coawuppancei the customer will get what he deserve*.
Moral : if you want sowthing. you’d better damn wall
negotiate it at the detailed level.

The strange languaga of computer people makes

more sense than laymen noceaserily realise.
It’s a generalized analytical way of looking
at time . space and activity . Consider the
following.

"THERE IS INSIGNIFICANT BUFFER SPACE IN

THE FRONT HALL." (Buffer: place to put
something temporarily.)

"BEFORE I ACKNOWLEDGE YOUR INTERRUPT. LET
ME TAKE THIS PROCESS TO TERMINATION "

"COOKING IS AN ART OF INTERLEAVING

TIME-BOUND OPERATIONS." (I.e.. doing
parts of separate job* in tha right order
with an aye on tha clock.)

hyiw» fw ;

In the early throes of computer enthusiasm,
it is e*sy to suppose that any thing can be done
by computer-- thet is, anything involving the
chewing or diddling of information. This is
decidedly not so.

For instance, It is easy enough, and often
practical, to have a computer do something a few
million tines. But it is almost never practical
to have a computer do something a trillion times.
Why? Well, let’s say (for the sake ot simnli-
city) that a certain program loop takes 1/1000
of a second. To do it a thousand times, then,
would take one second, and to do it a million
tines would take a thousand seconds, or about
seventeen minutes. But to do it a trillion times,
now, would mean doing it 17,000,000 a
over thirty years.

unutes ,

Now, you will note that even if you speed up
that loop to 1/1,000,000 of a second, a trillion
repetitions will take almost twelve days, which
is obviously going to need sone justifying, even
assuming that it is otherwise feasible.

(For problems of this type people begin
thinking about building special hardware, any¬
way It will be noted, for instance, that the
PDP-I6-- see p. - - lets you compile your own

special equipment for prohlems that need eter¬
nal repetitious.

COMBINATORIAL EXPLOSIONS

One kind of thing that's too much to do
is generally called a combinatorial explosion --
that is, a problem that "explodes"
many things to do. For instance, <
game of chess. Just because you <

isider the

program to look ahead at all the possible out¬
comes of, say, tic-tac-toe, that doesn't mean
you can consider all the possibilities of chess,
To look at ’’all" the possibilities just a few
moves ahead involves you in trillions of
calculations. Reuembcr about trillions? And
it turns out that there are a lot of problems
like that.

METHODS FOR DOING THINGS

Th# problem la alwaya to think up
methods for doing thing* by computer .
(Mao called algorithm* .)

Basically what can be don* by
ccaqnitar I* what can be dona on a
tab la top with slip* of paper— temper -
Ing, copying, aortlng, marking, doing
arlthmatlc— and handing slips of paper
out to uaar*.

So the question should never be,
-HOW would you do that by computer?"

— but "Can you think of a method
for acctsaplishlng that?” The "co^nitei
is really Irrelevant, for it has no
nature and merety twiddles Information

L_”

.Then there is the problem of "Turing im¬
possibility." Turing was a nathenatician who
discovered that some things can be done se¬
quentially in a finite amount of tine, and
some things can't , such as proving certain
types of mathematical theorem. In other words,
anything that has to do things in sequence--
whether a computer or a nind of God, if any--
cannot possibly know anything which is not
Turing-computable. Another important linita-
t ion.

On a more practical level, though, there
are just lots of things which nobody has figur¬
ed out how to do in any feasible way, or arc
just now figuring out different systematic ways
of doing. (For 3 favorite such area of mine,
compare the different conputer half-tone image
synthesis systems described on pp. DM lito
DM "5*| .)

Thus you see that figgering out ways of
doing stuff is still one of the principal as¬
pects of' the computer field. {Whole journals
are devoted to it, such as CACM, JACM and so on.)

But then of course, every few years there
comes a new movement in the field that bodes to
make us start all over.

One such trend is called structured prog¬
ramming , being promulgated by a Dutch research-
er named Dijkstra, among others. The idea of
structured programming is to restrict computing
languages in certain ways and "eliminate the
CO TO," i.e., no longer have jumps to labeled
places in programs. By dividing computer prog¬
rams up only in certain ways, goes this school
of thought, the programs can perhaps be proven
workable, in the mathematical sense, rather
than just demonstrated to work , as they are now--
a notoriously error-prone situation. If the
Dijkstra school is correct, we may have to
Start all over again with a new bunch of prog¬
ramming languages.

These remarks give you the flavor of some
restrictions and lines of development. The rest
of this page is devoted to The Great Software
Problem-- the Operating System.

OWVfcr

tfSTOfr'SfeO

• or OS/360, or OS

He have no space here to discuss OS,
the operating system of the IBM 360 and 370,
which it just as well: it is a notoriously
heavy-handed system, elaborated with what
some would call devastating nesslnoss. Kinds
of convenience taken for granted by users of
such computer systems as the Burroughs 3000,
the POP-10, DTSS snd others aren’t there.

The programmer has to concern himself
with intricacies having names like ACONs,

VCONs, TCBs, ECBs, and the complications of
JCL. (While these other systems may have
equivalent complications, the programmer
need not mess with them to create efficient
programs, as the 360 demands.) The pro¬
grammer must even set nldc the previous
programmer's information in "SAVE AREAS,"
which is like a restaurant guest having to
clear the dirty dishes on sitting down —
and return then when he leaves. Several of
the 360't sixteen general registers are con¬
fiscated. Time-sharing requires its own
JCL-type language. And so on.

IBM says its forthcoming operating sys¬
tem, OS/VS2-2, will be better.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A.L. Scherr, "The Design of IBM 0S/VS2 Re¬
lease 2." Proc. MCC 73, 317-394.

Basically, an operating system is a
program that supervises all the other pro¬
grams in a computer. For this reason it is
also called a supervisor or a monitor .
Because the operating system is supposed to
be in charge, many computers now offer spe¬
cial wired-in instructions that only the
operating system can use. This prevents
other programs from taking complete control
of the machine.

Operating systems cone in all sites.

The bigger ones take up a lot of computer
time because they have to do a tot. The
smallest kind, which are really kind of
different, are just to help a single pro¬
grammer move quickly between his basic
programs. {A typical such system Is PEC’s
DOS, or Disk Operating System, which you
can get with the PDP-11.) This system is
really a kind of butler that keeps track of
where your basic programs are stored on disk
and brings then in for you quickly.

A step up is the Batch Monitor, or op¬
erating system set up for Batch Processing
(see p.&~2X). In batch processing, pro¬
grams go through the computer as if on «
conveyer belt, one at a time (or in some
systems several at a tine). The operating
system shepherds then.

We’re waiting.

batch processing is used when programs
don't need any interaction with human users.
(Or, and this is more common, when human
users want time-sharing but can 1 t get it;
sec below.) A oultiprograimning operating
system is one that allows several different
programs (or conveyor-belt sequences of
batch programs) to operate at one tine.

(This is how most IBM 360s are used.)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M.V. Wilkes, Tine - Sharing Computer Systems .

MacDonald/American Elsevier Publishing Co.

All About Timesharing Service Companies ■

Oatapro Research (I Corporate Center,
Moorestown, NJ 08057), $10.

equipment snd working rules and schedules
and software. And change the parts through
which mischievous users crash the system.

Systems people often look like dirty
rats to users of computer systems. To
each ocher they often look like harried,
overworked, unsung heroes, their fingers
(snd whatever else) In the dike, crying
to hold back the tide of Disorder.

Then there is time-sharing.

Tine-sharing means the simultaneous use
if one computer by several different users
it once. It's basically a complex form of
lultiprogramming.

It was created by Keneny and Kurt:,
who created the BASIC language to be used
on it (see p. !{, ).

Their computer arrived in fall '63.
Their time-sharing systen went into opera¬
tion in spring '64, programmed mostly by
Dartmouth students , and has grown and im¬
proved continuously since then. On that
basis: programmed by students.

The Dartmouth computer philosophy--
i.e., the idea carried through by John
Kemeny and Tom Kurtz--was that a conputer
is like a library: its services should be

>ugh some general fund.

Students and faculty at Dartmouth
it free. (Unless they have grants.)
can use it too, if you pay.

In principle this is like a la:y susan.
The central computer works on one user’s pro¬
gram for a while, then on another's... until
it is back to the first user.

There are basically two kinds of time¬
sharing: time-sharing where you can only use
certain facilities or languages, and time¬
sharing where you can use all the facilities
of the computer (including programming in the
computer's assembly language).

The result: everybody at Dartmouth
uses the computer. It's always running,
(ahem) six days a week. There are almost
two hundred terminals around the campus;
peak afternoon usage is about a hundred
and fifty. Freshmen learn BASIC first
thing, after which the conputer is a
standing facility, to be used in courses
in music, sociology, literature, history,
engineering or whatever; for independent
research; or just for fun and games and
showing off to visitors.

Examples of restricted time-sharing are
the various minicomputer systems that arc
available which time-share the BASIC language.
{Nova and PDP-11 and Hewlett-Packard, for
instance.)

Some examples of unrestricted time¬
sharing are the PDP-10 (see p. Ho), Dart¬
mouth's DTSS, Honeywell's MULT1CS, IBM's TSO,
and General Electric's MARK III.

Bigger is not necessarily better. For
instance, there are time-shared versions of
BASIC that run on big IBM computers. How¬
ever, it may very well be that big IBM in¬
stallations can save money by eliminating
this function and buying instead a small
Hewlett-Packard minicomputer to run their
BASIC on, thereby supplying BASIC to more
users at less cost and freeing the 360 for
whatever it is IBM systems do better.

The entire Dartmouth system is built
for simplicity and clarity, with explana¬
tions of all the facilities available at
terminals. (The command expi ain JCK caus¬
es the terminal to type out a picture of
Kemeny.)

Many fuddy-duddies insist that computer
usage should be billed , as it is on most
college campuses': TTTat is essentially the
Calvinist view. But what if we treated li¬
braries like that? It would probably cost
S10 jus t to borrow any book . The point is
that lT"we - bcTTeve tKat certain conditions
are a social good, then we should be flex¬
ible about how to implement them. (5ee Arthur
W. Luehrmann and John M. Nevison, "Computer
Use under a Frec-Access Policy, Science , 31

May 74, 957-961. This articl" -

line of argument and further
Dartmouth billing system.)

:ribcs the

Restricted time-sharing, with only one
or a few languages offered, is much easier to
provide for than full time-sharing.

Full time-sharing is always shared with
batch. In other words, the computer, darting
among users, still finds some time to devote
to the batch stream.

Time-sharing is self-limiting. That is,
the more users are signed onto a tine-sharing
system at a given moment, the more slowly the
system responds to all of them.

Operating systems are big and hard to
program . They take a lot oTthe computer 7 *
time: for instance, Dartmouth's time-sharing
operating system, taking as much as 231 of
the computer's time, is considered efficient.

The importance of time-sharing is not in
terms of "raw" efficiency, that is, the cost
of each million operations, but in term* of
human efficiency, the ability of each user to
got so much more out of the computer by using
Interactive programs and languages.

OPERATING SYSTEMS TRICKERY

Anyway, Dartmouth will sell you its tim«
sharing system for about J7500 a month (and
you’ll need a computer setup that begins at
$17,500 a month). That’ll run 50 terminals.
A bigger setup will cost more. But that get!
you Fortran, COBOL, SN0B0L, etc.. ttc best
BASIC in the whole world, games, financial
systems, and myriad other programs they've
built at Dartmouth, Furthermore, Mr. Adminia
trator, it means the system will be available
to users with a minimum of complication and
bother.

A number of companies have bought. In¬
cluding the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis,
which offers Dartnouth-style computing to
its midshipmen.

Connect charge is $2 to $9 an hour
depending on your terminal
speed, plus processing charges.

Contact: DTSS, INC., Hanover Nil

037SS. (Several commercial
firms also offer DTSS to users,
including Computer Sharing Ser¬
vices, Inc. Denver; Crumman Data

WHERE TO GET IT

No way can we here get into the prose and
cons (both senses) of the myriad time-sharing
services that are available. An excellent
summary of fifty-six different time-sharing
services (variously using computers by Honey¬
well, IBM, DEC, Univac, CDC, Xerox and
Burroughs) appeared in the February, 1973
Computer Decisions ("Piecing Out the Timeshar¬
ing Puttie" by John R. Hillegass, pp. 24-32).
This summarises information available from
Oatapro Research Corp. , Moorestown, NJ. The
article cautions against the potential high
cost of tine-sharing services, and urges you
to get all the advice you can before commit¬
ting to a time-sharing service.

-4

IWCS!

MULT ICS was announced in 1965 as the
Time-Sharing System of All Time, to be
created jointly by MIT, General Electric
and Hell Labs.

It took a lot longer to get going
than they expected-- I have a 1968 (?)
button that says, YOU NEVER OUTGROW YOUR
Sinn FOR MULTICS-- but now it's available
from Honeywell. Tcople say it’s the
greatest, all right-- its fascinating
facilities include the ability to execute
parts of other people's programs, if you
have permission-- but it's also rtid to be
awfully expensive.

Interestingly, the MULTICS operating
systen is largely programmed in the PL/I
language (see p. ) .

Contact: Honeywell Information
5ysterns, 200 Smith Street,

MS 061, Waltham, Mass. 021S4.

VK UoRV$:
Grt'i

Sone tine-sharing systems are local, others
have "concentrators” allowing users in other
cities to log into them with local telephone
calls.

Perhaps the nost far-reaching time-sharing
system, though, is General Electric's MARK III,
with concentrators in many of the major cities
of the world (mostly Europe). The main com¬
puter is in Ohio, but the overall system may be
thought of as an octopus around the globe. Be¬
sides hundreds of cities in the USA, The GE
systen offers local access in Australia, Austria,
Belgium Canada. Denmark, Finland, France,

Italy. Japan, Netherlands. Norway, Puerto Rico.
Sweden, Swil:erlaml, United Kingdom and West

What this basically means IS that if a
pany has offices in these places, it can
its internal communication through General
ctric’s computer syst<

i presents obvious

,ts and Jifficul-
, lvv . ,j discuss here,
be expensive.

They also offer a toll-free

General Electric Informa¬
tion Service*

Business Division,

401 North Washington Jt ,
Rockville, Md. 20850.

T $0

it i
graaaing.
terminal

a sort of interactive batch pro-
That is. it allows the user at a
j communicate with program* running

in batch mode.

Swapping means transferring one user's
program out of core memory in order to move
in somebody else’* program. This can happen
very rapidly, and even when it's done to you
every turn, your terminal may seem to respond
as though you are in continuous possession of
the entire computer

The most enjoyable
Computer Conference was
Dartmouth System, DTSS.

•«.*lorn at ih* 1974 National
the Nostalgia session on the
Ih* Old Hands were there¬
on the original time-sharing
come grownups of on* sort or

Paging is one of the Great Abstruse
Problems ot modern operating systems. The
problem is this: you’ve always got fast ex¬
pensive memory and cheap slow memory. How
can the operating system store most of your
program in cheap slow memory and still predict
which parts you'll need soon enough to get
than In there for you? In the hotter systems,
indeed, the operating system tries to predict
what's most important and move it to a fast
little memory celled a cache . This are# it
so bitarr* and complicated 1 prefer not to
think about it. "Minis for me," says Mr.
Natural.

by J.r

man between

manufacturer

■ B. Wiener,

1* company to atop the Dartmouth "experl-
y he could, or loaa hi* job 1" ' hr «*
did no such thin*, snd (ha eaid) alter
continued to help the Dartmouth effort,
holding weekend meetings with other* fro-

w*-do-our-real-job medal.

> the Frances 0. Xalaay

la this IS * lorn ur t ' T

its detractors tend to compare it with
f call "true" time-sharing, such as
the PDP-10), it has a number of draw-

instance. on the modal 158. * f»»r-
machina (ca. JS0,000 a month-- see
fio normally allows only twint*

Jill*

IBM is urging its fan*
text operating system,
be much better.

to believe that
called OS/V52-2,

HtRf THEY COM-He

0>*Tvr&es i Mi ip c co^py^Jt;

■B 19 flea. have little flee, that bite 'eeu
And no forth, «d Infinitum ."

Microprocessors are what’s happening

Computers cost several thousand bucks on up.
Microprocessors cost several hundred on up, and
that price range Is falling fast.

Soiae ■icroprocessors are already on integra ¬
ted circuits . postage stamp-sized electronic
tangles that are simply printed and baked, rather
than wired up; this means there is effectively
no bottom limit to the price of microprocessors.
Sark this well. It means that in a few years
there will be a microprocessor in your refriger¬
ator, your typewriter, your lawnmower, your car,
and possibly your wallet. (If you don’t believe
this, look what happened to pocket calculators in
the last couple of years. The chip those are
built around costs five bucks. But next come the
programmable chips, the microprocessors.)

Microprocessors should not be called micro ¬
computers , a term that seems to have captivated
Kail Street lately. "Microcomputer" just means
any teeny computer; but there is an exact and
crucial difference between an ordinary computer
(whatever its size) and a micToprocesaor (what-

A microprocessor is a two-level computer .

You will remember from the "Rock Bottom”
section (pp. 32-3) that every computer has an
internal language of binary patterns or "machine
language" (illustrated in horrendous detail in
the program called "Bucky’s Kristwatch," pp.33-4).

This means, for instance, that machines can
be created which may be programmed directly in some
higher-level language, such as APL (note Canadian
machine described on p. Z-l) or BASIC (note one of
the Hewlett-Packard machines described on p. 17 ).

T^ ar * Cl * rS in the u PP er “ level program (APL or
BASIC), stepped through by the upper-level program
follower, cause the lower-level program follower to
carry out the operations of the language.

Second, the machine costs less to make than an
ordinary computer. The reason is that the archi¬
tecture of ordinary computers is designed now (at
J*? 1 ) 5° r ..PI°yy* J1, f r convenience . Thus a machine
like the PDP-11, which in principle does nothing
any other computer doesn’t do, is still more desir¬
able than most, because its instructions arc so
well designed. It is clear and sensible to the pro¬
grammer, with the result that programming it takes
less tisie and costs less money.

Microprocessors reverse this trend. The lower-
level structure of registers and instructions can be
anything that is convenient to manufacture, whether
or not programmers like it. Low manufacturing cost
is one of the mam design criteria.

The purpose of microprocessors, you see, is
generally to be hidden in other equipment and do
some simple thing over and over; not to have their
programs changed around all the tine as on an ordi¬
nary computer.

?*? re exceptions, computers which have a
second level down where you can put microprograms;
and these are called, sensibly enough, aicroprogran-
■me computers . They are bought and s et up wi t h
regular computer accessories, plus facilities to
change the microprograms. Thus they cost a lot more;
but oh, they do so much more for you. You can design
your own computer-- i.e., its instruction-set-- and
then create it, with a microprogram. (See the Stan¬
dard Computer and the Meta-4, n?arby.)

another binary language

tbal’e cheaper to wire up.

UAWiWAee.-

equipment itself.

Softuhik.-

computer programs

FMmitc:

underprogrsms for
microprocessors (Also
callad Microprograms.

Should be called Undarware.)

The trick that makes this all work-- whether
for the hidden-away type or the computer type of
microprocessor-- is that the lower level has a much
faster memory than the upper level. This neans
that an upper-level word can be taken, and looked
up in the lower level, and all the lower-level steps
carried out, very fast compared to the upper-level
memory. Many such“nac>i ines, for instance, have
lower-level speods in the nanoseconds (billionths
of a second), while the upper-level speeds are mere¬
ly in the microseconds (millionths of a second).

A last point. One of the most important char¬
acteristics of an ordinary computer is its word
length, that is, the number of binary positions in
a usual chunk of its information.

rrmie ijrr ..i

DM fit Mi; ,« , vj

CeMM. twsu*^ (to i.tj, ,t* f vi_)

But Jince microprocessors have two separate levels,
they often have two separate word lengths as well;
the upper-level and the lower-level.

between--

ROM-- Read-Only ,Memory. Contents can’t be

changed, costs less than changeable (at
any given speed).

RAM-- Rapid-Access Memory. Also called

read-write memory. Same as core memory:
May have its contents changed. NOT!; if
you simulate some computer with a micro¬
program, its simulated "registers" are
usually locations in the lower-level RAM.

RMM-- Read-Mostly Memory. You can get out its
contents fast, but change them onlv very
slowly.

(The lower-level memory is sometimes called
"program memory" and the upper-level memory is often
called "data memory, but this is a confusion result¬
ing from certain typical applications of the devices,
rather than their inherent nature. You can have
programs at both levels.)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Raymond M. ilolt and Manuel R. i.emas, "Current
Microcomputer Architecture.” Computer
Design , Feb 74, 65-73. --

Summarizes nine teeny machines now
on the market (some 1-level). Good bib¬
liography also.

Standard Conputci

Burroughs 1700

36 bits
16 bits
900 nsec
24 bits

ilig 6 expensive.

Op to 32 hard¬
ware registers.
Comes with cassette
holding various
emulators,

3650 stripped.

Aire. Jr?——

gramned t

r IIP computei

Microdata 3200

64 bits
165 nsec
(190 read-s

as well. $7500.

$8000 up ($10,000
for model 32/S,
stack-oriented).

$15,000 to $100,000
(heavy upgrade of
Varian 620).

^i ceopfectirwer t*> *e »»fro

Intel Mcs-e
Intel MCS-4
SYS 500

> 24 bit!
10 nsec
r 16 bit!

Ml C 1

> 800
} 1600

(Keird but lnt
among many s
16 bits
220 nse
200 nse

AES-80 (Auto. Electric
Systems, Montreal)

National Semiconductor

IMP-16C (8 1/2 x 11-- odd si
DEC PDP-16M 8 bits

240 nsec 240

for computi

Stack-oriented (nc
fas ter model).
Basic chip $60.

$1380 stripped
, convenient for notebook.)

$2000. I Compatible

Atron 601

16 bit

^(Abbreviations: nsac (nanoseconds,
usee (microseconds, millionth:,
abbreviation).)

The history hooks ten years
will note that the first computer-on-a-chln ._

to placement in others’ machines at low cost Thl.
means that if you make a fancy bulldozer or bake-

ore Ai !!!!*.'(“hV 1 • t0 have 50 " ,c r ° rn of intricate
pre-planned hehavior, you’ll p ut "the Intel chip"

chins AC whic’ l , )r sJ»% 1, ? tel Cl ‘ ,p ” * nu ' nb * r of separate
chips, vhic.t start low in cost-- a fairly coupletc

lnJo C ! n f b ?i h#J f0T unJer JS0 °" ani1 can i> e assembled
fee eomni’J con P uter - (Indeed, various firms do of-
cludin7ine%h OS>PU Ullt ° Ut ° f Intcl thirTT 1"

25 B yeSrs!? ° f ° re ° C °° kie * *«T«t..d

MCS,

HCS-4

MCS-8

^The original Intel chips are the MCS-4

Upper level

Lower level

4 bit

>. 16 bits
(900 nanoseconds)

(10.8

microseconds)

9 bits 8 to 24 bits

112 ’? , WO nanoseconds)

microseconds)

While these individual chins cost under a hundred
dollars each, memories and other necessary sections
cost extra. For people who want to develop systems
around these chips, Intel has cannily prepared a nua-
ber of setups. If you want to go 4-bit, you get the
Intellec 4, $2200, which also needs a Teletype,

This give* yo u various display lights and debugging
features. Meanwhile, you can assemble and simulate
on simulation programs offered on national tirae-shar-
want t0 8° 8 ‘ bU - Y 011 the "Intellec
8 for $2400 (also without Teletype), and benefit ad¬
ditionally from the fact that you can prepare the
underware in PL/1 , and compile it on national time-
sharing.

Crafty and clever Intel, which has captured nuch
of the overall market .ilrcady, has now brought out
nuch faster versions of these chips. RaJi.

•tie

A computer wittily called the Meta 4 (hen heh)
is a fairly neat machine made by Digital Scientific
Corp. , 11455 Sorrento Valley Rd., San Diego CA 92121.

lower memory: 16 bits, 90 nanoseconds (or 35
nanoseconds, programmed by a card (on
which you darken the squares .)

Upper memory: 16 bits, 900 nanoseconds.

What this is is a very high-power minicomputer:
it can be turned into a lookalike for any other 16-bit
minicomputer. For instance, they can sell it to you
with an imitative microprogram that turns it effec¬
tively into an IBM 1130. From a marketing point of
view, this effectively means a firm owning an IBM 1130
can replace it with a Meta 4 which runs the same pro¬
grams, saves money and gives you in addition the bot-
ton-level features of a far more powerful computer.
(Such an under-level program that makes one machine
effectively imitate another computer is called an
emulator.) This capacity to emulate other computers
is the "metaphor” alluded to in the machine's name.

sue,

The Lockheed SUE ("System User-Engineered
Computer") Is a very Interesting and desirable
machine. The central processing unit costs s little
over six hundred and forty dollars! (That's without
memory, power supply or card cage. ) It uses s
Grand Dus system of interconnection (see p. HZ )-

It’s s microprocessor. The lower-level cycle
time is 50 nanoseconds , so it can be programmed to
imitate any microsecond mini.

One nice thing is that you can put together
several epu'a and different memories-- core,
semiconductor and ROM- - selecting with switches
which epus have what priorities in what memories,
as well as Interrupts, stc. Dim nice-- especially
considering tha upper-level instruction-eel.

Ths microprogram it cornea with makes tha
Lockheed SUE into a sort or copy (77) of the PDP-11,
including its sight registers and similar address
modes (see p.'il.) ■

Was the name SUE actually Lockheed’s
Impudent challenge to DEC7 DEC did sue, but no
outcome has been publicised.

w Sifityntp

A microprogrammablc higgle has been available
for some tine. It’s a 36-blt conputor nanufacturad
by Standard Conputor Corporation, 1411 K. Oiynpic
Boulevard, Los Angelas, CA 90015.

This conputer is a serious machine, in the
nany-hundrad-thousand-dollar class, which can be
set up to ninic any other 36-blt nachine. It has
been sold in two versions: one a pure FORTRAN na¬
chine (that’s right, its upper language,, is pure
Fortran!) and a lookalike for the
level word length is 18 bits.

IBM 7094.

(An interesting puzzle is why this outfit has
not gotten together with Lincoln laboratories. Lin¬
coln Laboratories, outside Boston, has a 36-bit ex-
perlnental machine celled the TX-2 which has been
used for computer graphics, such as Sutherland s
SKETCHPAD syston (see p. and Sucker I CENE-

SYS (see p. 29 )■ Now, presumably Lincoln Lab*,
like most other research outfits, is hurting for
money. Why couldn’t thev make an arrangement for
Standard to sell its machine with a TX-. emulator,
thus making.available such programs as Sketchpad ^
(which has never been equalled) to a wider public.

'13

4* /fa

There are a lot of stranje coaputan being
dealgned— it’s a traditional occupation of
electronics professors and a great war to soak
the Defense Department— but this one la coa-
nerctally available. Mow if we just knew what
to do with it.

Goodyear's STARAH is the first available
computer with a Content-Addressable Memory,
which is actually very hot stuff. Instead of
having to search for a particular item of infor¬
mation in core, or having to make lists of where
in core things are being put, or creating linked
data structures (soe p. 2&> ) > the program can
simply ask all items of data having particular
properties to step forward.

It works like this. Having an immense 256-
bit word to play with, the programmer uses dif¬
ferent parts or "fields* of the word (see p. t*, ^-2'
to specify what other information ia in iti *

F-of

1**1

lie*-}

M<J

With a single command, the program may ask
all words in memory to clesr s particular field,
or set a particular bit. Then with another com¬
mand it can tell all memory locations with par¬
ticular identifiers to add a certain number to
their data, and this occurs in a couple of micro¬
seconds. Or it can direct all memory locations
having particular identifiers to multiply one
section of their data by another-- which takes
rather longer.

Thia is an entirely different kind of pro¬
gramming, and considering how much thought com¬
puter people have given to doing things one at a
time, it kind of sets you back a little. Tbs
brochure lists these possible spplicationat
'ballistic missile defense," "intelligence dsta
processing," "electronic warfare," "airborne
command and control," as well as more peaceful
applications like weather prediction, data man-
"Comoot, transportation reservations, air traffic
control. Truth is, moat computer people would
have to scratch their - heads quite s while to fig¬
ure out how to start using this fascinating ma¬
chine for any of theae things; the reason the
military applicationa seem to be so many la sim¬
ply that the military computer types have boen
scratching their heads longer. We might as
well start too, and find some of the nicer things
to do for humanity with it.

iuiiH

The I Iliac IV is the biggest and most
extraordinary computer in the world, knock
wood. To most computer people it's as big as
anything they want to think about.

The Illiac 4 consists of sixtv - four big¬
gish computers, all going at once under the
supervision of yet another big computer, typ¬
ically all working on a single problem. It
is the brainchild of Daniel Slotnick, who
worked on the theory of array computers and
pressed for its creation for years; eventually
built by Burroughs, it sits at an airbase but
is available to outside users through the
ARPA network.

In principle the idea is this; certain
classes of problems, especially those involv¬
ing very large arrays and matrices, can be
run only rather slowly on ordinary computers.

If, however, a computer is built which itself
is an array, certain operations can take - place
very much faster because they happen in paral¬
lel units simultaneously. Matrices, partic¬
ular formal kinds of array, arc used in a
great variety of mathematical-type applications.
For instance, weather prediction. It seems
that the theory of weather prediction has been
well worked out for decades, but because the
swirly behavior of the atmosphere is so intri¬
cate, actually calculating out everything in¬
volves billions of operations. At one confer¬
ence session I believe it was explained that
it used to take twenty-five hours to predict
the weather twenty-four hours in advance, whi
which means you get the answer an hour after
it's happened already; now it is possible,
using Illiac IV, to do the whole planet's wea¬
ther in an hour and a half, said the speaker.

Some say that may be its only use and
the whole project was inadequately thought
out. Others suspect it's really intended as
a radar-watcher for the ABM system.

Anyway, there it is. And the individual
briefcase-sized Burroughs machines, if they're
ever marketed, may provide a new price break¬
through for smalt highpower systems.

/-/

Incidentally, "Illiac" is the traditional
name for computers built at the University of
Illinois. Will the series end with this one?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Daniel J. Slotnick, "Unconventional Systems "
Proc. SJCC 1967, 477-481.

Bibliography: Jack A. Rudolph, "A Production

Implementation of an Associative Array Pro¬
cessor— STARAH," Proc. FJCC 72, 229-241.
Contact: Computer Division Marketing, Goodyear
Aerospace Carp. Akron, 0. 44315.

An interesting but little-known computer
was the Ambilog, made by Adage, Inc. of Bos¬
ton, a most inno-'ative machine first marketed
in the mid-sixties.

The Ambilog is a hybrid computer, i.e.
both digital and analog ( Analog Compu¬

ters, p. II) , it was mentioned that "analog
computers" are any electrical circuits set up
to produce a result according to some formula).
For certain types of repetitive functions,
analog makes a lot of sense. Thus the Adage
people put this machine together for highly
efficient hybrid computing.

The essential idea was to have a highly
ventilated machine that could take in and put
out measurable electric signals at high rates.
What they created was a rather straightforward
digital computer with a lot of registers and
converters to send analog information out and
bring it back in. This meant that problems
suited to repetitive electrical twisting and
measurement could gush out through special
analog circuits, and the "answers" or doctored
signals could gush back in.

The instruction-set was designed for this
high-speed management of input and output.

The principal applications this equipment
has been used for are three-dimensional dis¬
play )see Adage Display, p.Ji^O 0 ) and Fourier
analysis for sound and other applications (sec
P- Wa. r 3Ml)

Now that integrated circuits are getting
cheap, the distinction betweon registers (where
things happen to information) and memory (where
nothing happens to information) can be recon¬
sidered. Storing information in colls that can
themselves perform actions, or having numerous
subsystems in which computation takes place,
leads to a fascinating variety of possible ar¬
chitectures. Theae are generically called
"cellular* computers; this ia slightly ironic
considering that the living cell itself is now
known to oe at least a digital memory, and prob¬
ably more (see p. U>0 ).

examples of cellular computera m-.-.a or loss
include STARAH, ILLIAC IV and the author 1 a own
hypothetical FANTAS*J fcn (see p!*\5j). But this
type of architecture has barely be-pin.

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I have heard no computer more widely
praised among computer people than the Bur¬
roughs 5000 (replaced by the S500). The 5000
was designed about 1960 hy Edward Glaser and
Bob BaYton. It was designed to be used only
with higher languages , not allowing program¬
mers access to the binary instructions them¬
selves. Indeed, it was particularly designed
to be used with ALGOL., which would have been
the standard language if IBM had allowed it
(see p. ‘SI ) and is still the "international"
language.

Because of this approach, its main regis¬
ters were to be hidden from the programmer,
and attention centered instead upon the stack ,
a high-level programming device (see bo* on
Stacks). However, index registers were added
to make it better for Fortran.

The 5000 was marketed as an "all-purpose”
computer with an operating system, anticipating
IBM's 360 of a few years later. Indeed, after
the 360 was announced, Burroughs sales picked
up, because IBM salesmen were at last-promoting
the concepts that customers hadn't understood
when they heard about them from Burroughs
salesmen years before.

Bigger machines in the line are now the
6500, 6700...

The Burroughs Corporation continues to
be an acknowledged leader in computer design.
Apparently their sales force is something else,
unfortunately. I once spent some time with a
Burroughs salesman who not only knew nothing
about the magnificent structure of the machine
he represented, but would not get me further
information unless I demonstrated that the
company’I represented (a large corporation)
was seriously interested. He wore very fancy
clothes.

d) unx

TMe me s .

The Stack is a mechanism-- either built
into the computer ("hardware") or incorpora¬
ted in a program ("software") which allows a
computer to keep track of a vast number of
different activities, interruptions and com¬
plications at the same time.

Basically, it is a mechanism which allows
a program to throw something over its shoulder
in order to do something else, then reach hack
over its shoulder to get back what it was
previously working on. But no matter how many
things it throws over its shoulder, everything
stays orderly and continues to work smoothly,
till it has resumed everything and finished
them all.

It goes like this: if the program has
to set aside one thing, it puts that one thing
in core memory at a place specified by a
number called a stack pointer . Then it adds
one to the stack pointer, to be ready in Case
something else has to go on the stack. This
is called a PUSH.

"rurr

When a program is ready to resume a prev¬
ious activity, it subtracts one from the
stack pointer and fetches whatever that stack
pointer points to. This is called a POP.

the addresses of programs, data we are moving
between programs, intermediate results, and
codes that show what the computer was doing
previously.

Using stacks, programs may use each other
very freely. It is possible, for instance,
to jump among subroutines-- independent little
programs-- willy-nilly, using a stack to keep
track of where you've been.

In this case the stack holds the previous
locations and intermediate data, so that the
program follower can go back where it came
from at the end of each subroutine.

ST*CK

AsWanmuiG.

^r^up.

and recursive' programs, meaning programs

Stacks are also used for handling "interrupts"
-- signals from outside that require the
computer to set aside one job for another.
Having a built-in hardware stack enables the
interrupts to pile up without confusion:

ill cure memory. As a sil
on a hypothetical raachin
to handle

On this machine,
to a program and

let's say, this gets compiled
a stack:

Then the operati

stack itself:

tM3 rof ~p=t

Stack programming tends to be efficient,
particularly in its use of core memory.

Some languages, such as Algol and TRAC
Language, require stacks.

Some computer companies, such as IBM,
resolutely ignore stack architecture, though
hardware stacks have become widely adopted
in the field.

In electronics, a "bus" is a common
connector that supplies power or signals to
and from several destinations. In computers,
a "bus" is a common connection among several
points, using carrying a complex parallel
signal.

The Grand Bus, a new idea among computers,
is catching on. (The term is used here be¬
cause the colloquial term, "Unibus," is a DEC
trademark.)

Basically the Grand Bus is a connector
of multiple wires that goes among several
pieces of equipment. So far that's just a
bus. But a Grand Bus is one that allows the
different pieces of equipment to be changed
and replaced easily, because signals to any
common piece of equipment just go out on the

This means that the interface problem
is deeply simplified, because any device with
a proper bus interface can simply be plugged
onto the bus.

It does mean a lot more complexity of
signals. The Unibus, for example, has about
fifty parallel strands. But that means var¬
ious tricky electrical dialogues can rapidly
give instructions to devices and consider re¬
plies about their status, in quick and stan¬
dardized ways.

Prominent grand buses include:

The PDP-11 is not a beginner's computer.
But the power and elegance of its architecture
have established it, since its introduction in
1970, as perhaps the foremost small computer
in the world.

Actually, though, we can't be too sure
about the word "small." Because as successive
parts of the line arc unveiled, it becomes in¬
creasingly clear that this line of "small"
computers has been designed to include some
very powerful machines and coupling techniques
among them; and it would seem that we haven’t
seen everything yet.

1 U

(it MO

In other words, DEC's PDP-11,
which has already cut into sales
of their PDP-8 12-bit series ond
PDP-1S 18-bit series, may soon cut
into its PDP-10 36-blt series-- as
designer Bell unveils (perhaps)
monster PDP-lls in arrays or double
word-length or whatever.

The PDP-11 was designed by C. Gordon Bell
and his associates at Carnegie-Mellon Univer¬
sity. In designing the architecture, and es¬
pecially the instruction-set, they simulated
a wide variety of possibilities before the
final design was decided. The resulting ar¬
chitecture is extremely efficient and powerful
(see box, "The 11's Modes").

The Hova bus (nameless; the first?)
PDP-11's Unibus

Basically it is a lb-bit machine, with
nost instructions operating on 8-bit data as
well.

There are eight main registers. Two,
though, function specially: the program coun¬
ter (that part of the program follower that
holds the number of the next instruction), and
the hardware stack pointer, both follow the
same programming rules as the main registers--
an unusual technique. Thus a jump in the pro¬
gram is simply a "move" instruction, in which
the next program address is "moved” into main
register *7, the program counter.

In addition, all external devices seem to
the program to be stored in core memory. That
is, the interface registers of accessories
have "addresses” numerically similar to core
locations-- so the program just "moves" data,
with MOVE instructions, to doorways in core.
(This is facilitated by the automatic handling
of previously bothersome stuff, like Ready,
Wait and Done bits.j

Physically all devices are
to a great sash of wires called
Grand Bus box.)

simply attached
a Unibus. (See

R.W. Southern, PDP-11 Programming
Fundamentals . (Programmed work-
fool"! Vo price listed.) Algon-

PDP-11 lookalikes are
sold by Cal Data. Other firms
have been scared off by DEC'S
patent, but Cal Data say they
have a patent too.

Lockheed SUE'* Infibus
PDP-8*> Omnibus.

The idea is great in general. For your
home audio equipment, for instance, Grand Bus
architecture would simplify everything.

Not only that, but Detroit is supposedly
going to put your car's electrical system on
a Grand Bus. This will mean you can tell at
once what is and Isn't working, and hook up
new goodies easily.

-W ll'f

iMs&kl

problem In mini architecture 1* how to cram Into
the Instruction enough choices tor ftttint around
in core memory.

In designing the PDP-11, Cordon Sell and hia
co-worksrs systematically sought a powerful sol¬
ution, simulating various possible structures by
computer program, trying out a variety of differ¬
ent combinations and structures.

The slsgance and power of the solution are
little short of breathtaking. Saslcally the PDP-
11. the final design, providss savan different
types of indirect addressing. The cos^utar's

information (the usual technique, hare called
mode aeroI, or to point to locations to be oper¬
ated on (indirect nodes 1 through 7). Thass
provide extremely efficient naans for stepping
through tables, push and POP, dispatch tablas,
and various other programing techniques. The
following diagram la meant for handy reference.

(5i V«K If, !>«b, 8 Lfr, i UjJ

"Ho corporation areept IKK eowld eel l a aaqruttr like thit." — x friend.

The IBM 360 (now called 370 because we're in the 70s) is
the commonest and most successful line of computer in the world.

This does not necessarily mean it is the best. There are those

who appreciate IBM typewriters but not their computers.

360s are bought because the repair service is great; be¬
cause IBM has very tough salesmen; and possibly for other rea¬

sons (see pp, S2-4).

A strange unseen curse seems to haunt the 360 series; in¬
deed, some cynics even think it results from deliberate poli¬
cies of IBM' Yet the 360 (and its software) seem somehow or¬
ganized to make programs inefficient and slow; to make programs
big. needing lots of core memory (with numerous enticements for
the programmer to take up more); to prevent the compatibilities
that are so widely advertised, except through expensive options;
to make things excessively complicated, thus lacking in both tts
customers and the employee* of Its customers to practices and
intricacies that are somehow unnecessary on other brands of

The design of the 360, which was basically decent, is gen¬
erally attributed to Amdahl, Blaauv and Brooks. Those who hate
it, and there are many, base their complaints largely on the
restrictions and complications associated with its operating
system OS, which is notoriously inefficient (see p. 15 ).

The architecture of the 360 was quite similar to the POP-6
(now the POP-10), designed about the same time; sixteen main
general-purpose registers of over thirty bits, and using the
16 main registers as either accumulators or index registers.

A curious form of addressing was adopted, called "base-
register addressing." This had certain advantages for the oper¬
ating system that was planned, and was thought to be sufficient¬
ly powerful that you wouldn’t need Indirect Addressing. Two
main registers were required, one holding a "base" more or less
equal to the program's starting address, and an "index register,"
whose contents are added to the base to specify an address.

Often a third number, or "offset," is added as well.

The idea of this technique is that programs can be "relo¬
catable,” operating anywhere in core memory. A few instructions
at the beginning of each program can ascertain where it is run¬
ning from, and establish the Base accordingly.

The basic idea of the 360 seems to have been doped out for
multiprogramming, or the simultaneous running of several pro¬
grams in core, a feature IBM has pushed heavily with this com¬
puter.

WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE 360?

The main differences between the 360 and the PDP-6 and 10
represent conscious and legitimate and arguable design decisions.
To fans of the PDP-6 and 10, here are the 360's main drawbacks:

NO INDIRECT ADDRESSING. This was because, within the ad¬
dressing scheme adopted, indirect addresses could not be adjusted
automatically. (But it also makes programs more inefficient,
thui more profitable to IBM.)

NO STACK.
Brooks In the II
15000 PDP-U*-“
money on prograi

Too cxpensivi
t would have i

. said Amdahl, Blaauw and
Funny, they have stacks on
ived everybody a lot of

NO MEMORY MAPPING (except on certain models). Where the
PDP-6'a successor, the POP-10, automatically takes cere of re¬
distributing addresses In core to service evory program as if
it were operating from location zero on up, the 360 left this
general problem to local programmers and (on certain levels) to
operating systems.

Handling thia automatically In the POP-10's hardware ob-
?*** complications of base-index addressing and makes pos¬
sible the efficiencies of Indirect addressing.

LOOKALUES

360 lookalikes were sold by RCA and Uni vac. Now that RCA
Mda° n *' r Mk<> * “■P' 11 *”* Ul » iv » c i» servicing the ones they

Corp. is coming down tSe pike with a super-360 of his own, in
part backad by Japanese money. It will be bigger then IBM's
*' » n<1 cheaper. (See Hesh Wiener, "Outdoing IBM: the

end now head of the Amdahl

Amdahl Challenge,” Computer Deci

Instructions can be executed at light¬
ning speed, much faster than the usual micro¬
second or so. However, since core memory is
much slower than the main registers, a trick
is used: program instructions are drawn from
core into a superfast instruction list loften
called a cache )■ and any Jumps or loops with¬
in this seven-word cache can be executed at
unthinkable speeds-- perhaps tens of millions
of times per second.

It was never sold commercially. A dozen
or so were made up specially out of DEC mod¬
ules and dealt out to various scientists, and
the general hope was that DEC would take the
machine up ns part of its product line, but
that's not what happened. DEC instead pushed
its PDF-8 and gave us instead, by and by,

ik I3HC-S

The machine is especially geared for
floating-point numbers (see p. OQ). Because
of the intense speed of the fast instruction
cache, many instructions (such as nulciplica-

plished faster by a short program than if
they had actually been wired" into the computer.

They 6600 became the start of a whole
line, including the 6400, 6800 and others*

The 6400 is used by PLATO (sec p.>hlt'f]).

*fMA

P b L; t‘)

DEC was offered the option of building
Lincoln Laboratories' classic LINC, but deci¬
ded instead to combine it, in the mid-sixties,
with the already-successful PDP-8. That way
all the PDP-8 programs and most of the LINC
programs would work on it. The result is kind
of strange, but very popular in biomedical re¬
search: two computers in one, handing control
back and forth as needed. You can write pro¬
grams on the Line with sections for the 8, and
vice versa. Hmm. A more recent and slicker
version is called the PDP-11.

While you might hal(-think that both
sides of the computer could work simultaneously,
giving you double speed, it doesn’t work that
way. There's only one core memory, and that
sets the basic speed; cither a FDP-a instruc¬
tion or a Line instruction can be underway at
once, but not both.

Nevertheless, we see here the double
structure that plays such an important part
In highly interactive computer displays (see
p, )• Indeed, Line programmers often

use the machine just that way: the PDP-8 run¬
ning an actual program, the Line part running
the CRT display in conjunction with it.

The baelc design of the Nova ia sleek
and simple! four main registers, no stack,
well-designed instructions. Moreover, it
was (I think) the first computer to be built
around a Grand Bua (no' UO15J) , a design which
has caught on rather widely.

Data Ceneral (the company mentioned)
haa used a very intereating marketing strat¬
egy. Instead of bringing out a variety Of
new computers as time goes on, they concen¬
trate on making the Nova faster and smaller.
They began by competing against DEC— es¬
pecially in "the OEM market," purchasers who
•re burying minicomputers in larger equipment
they in turn make-- but more recently they
have actually atarted to market against IBM
with buainaaa systems . In recent montha,

Data Ceneral ads have ridiculed tho complex¬
ity and myatery of XtUi ayatems , arguing quite
rightly that minicomputers programmed in
BASIC are a reasonable alternative for e wide

The Nova'a instruction-set Is clean
and straightforward. key esemples (firet
bits only)1

OOOOO Jump (thus an all-aero in¬
struction Jump# to loc if)

UWK )X Subroutine jump

OOOXO Increment, skip if sero

OOOXX Decrement, skip if aero

OOX Loed AC

UXO Stars AC

X Instructions among registers.

A horrifying and weird

picture of an experl-

mental monkey sitting

on a PUP-12 and making

like the Creature from

the Black Lagoon is

to be seen in Time, 14

Jan 74, p. 54. It

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The classic book: C. Cordon Bell and Allen
Newell, Compute r e structures :^ Readings

Note that Bell designed various
of the POPs, and Newell pioneered in
list processing (see p. 2.C, ).

Computer Characteristics ^ KevIe^ keeps you^

computers and peripherals. $25/year
(3 issues) GML Corp., 594 Marrett Rd.,
Lexington, MA 02173.

Other firms, such as Auerbach,
offer more expensive service* of the

B. Better, The Architecture and Engineering
of DlgTTil ~ rompu'te'r" CoapTTxes . Plenum
P7e*s" 2 vols., 540.

Heavier than Bell and Newell. A
catalog of thousand* of structures and
tricks, emphasizing the tradeoffs among
them.

One competitor. Digital Computer con¬
trol*, eella a Nova lookaliks. whether Data
General will Bell you Ite program* to run on
it ia another queation.

Jt>Mi

ewGwnp

Here, then, are some thumbnail descrip¬
tions of some great, classic or popular com¬
puters, expanding our basic diagrams as needed.

Individual computers represent variations
of the patterns shown so far.

The particular structure of registers,
memories and pathways among them is called the
architecture of a computer (see p. 32, ). The
binary instructions available to the program¬
mer are called the instruction - set of the
particular computer (see p<35)* (The word
"architecture" is often used to cover both,
including the instruction-set as well.)

The principal variations among computers
are the word length (in bits-- see "binary
patterns," p-3^) and the number and arrange¬
ment of main registers. Then come the details
of the instruction-set, especially the ways
in which items are selected from core memory
-- the addressing structure. Then the instruc¬
tion-set, whose complications and subtleties
can be considerable indeed.

The individual computer is the complex
result of all of these. If they fit together
well, it is a good design. If they fit to
gether poorly, it is a bad design. A bad de¬
sign is usually not so much a matter of overt
stinky features as of ramifications which fit
together disappointingly. (Glitch is a term
often used for such stinky features or rela¬
tionships.)

The possible ways of organizing computing
hardware are vast, and only partly explored,

(An aside to computer guys: on the Intel chip
debugging consoles they have an address trap
(trapping on a presettable effective address)
and a pass counter (trapping after n passes).
How come we haven't seen these sooner?)

The machines mentioned here are an arbi¬
trary selection. Some of them are the Great
Numbers, computers so important that folks use
their numbers as proper nouns, with no brand
name:

"Do you have a 360 up there?"

"No, but there’s a 6600, a 10 and a
bunch of 8s."

"Personally, I'd rather work on a 5500."
Here is what they are talking about.

The IBM 7090 was the classic computer.
Introduced about i 960 and mostly gorto by '66,
it was simple and powerful, with clean and
decent instructions. With its daughter the
7094, it became virtually standard at uni¬
versities, research institutions and scien¬
tific establishments. At many installations
that went on to 360s they long for those
clearminded days.

The 90 had three index registers and
fifteen bits to specify core addresses.

(This meant, of course, that core memory
could ordinarily be no longer than 32,768
words ("32K"— see "Binary patterns," p.U’J.)
A later model, the 94, went up to 7 index
registers, since there were three bits to
select them with.

f*Ui
A 4^6

The PDP-8 was designed by Gordon Bell
(in its original version, the PDP-5) about
I960. Originally it cost about $2S,OOG; as
of May 1974 that price is down to about $3000,
® r ls*s than a thousand dollars if you want
to buy the circuits and wire it all up your¬
self. Tup, here comes that Heathkit.

The PDP-8 has been DEC 1 s hottest seller>
you'll find them in industrial planta and
museums, or even hidden in the weirdest equip¬
ment, from typesetting devices to big disk
drives. At universities all over there are
kids who know them inside out.

Today the PDP-8 aeema archaic, with ita
one accumulator and awkward addressing schemes!
you can only get to 2^6 different addresses in
core memory directly, and it's chopped up into
pages. But for its time it was a brilliant
design, packed like a parachute, and even to¬
day there are people who swear by it. (But
look at what Bell's done lately! the PDP-11.)

So many programs exist for the PDP-8,
though, and so much sentimental fondness, that
ft will be with us for the foreseeable future.
Thus the "Ducky's Wrist watch" example («««»>.

is not totally frivolouai we may assume
that a PDP-8 on one or two wri*twatch-sized
chips is only a year or so away. But let's
hope they do the 11 firet.

(Lookalikes available from Digital Computer
Controls and Fabri-Tek.t

Though these were million-dollar ma¬
chines ten years ago, you now hear of them
being offered free to anyone who'll cart
them away; partly because they needed a lot
of power, airconditioning and oso on. But
they were great number crunchers. (If you
want a 90, I believs that 90 lookalikes are
still available from Standard Machines in
California.)

Univac's 1106 and 1108 are fast, highly
regarded machines. In designing the computer
Univac did a clever thing: they built an up¬
graded 7094. This meant (as I understand it)
that all the programs from the old 7094 will
run on it. But instead of two main registers
they have 28.

(Where they found the bits in the instruc¬
tion word to select among all those registers
I can't tell you.)

The 1108 is a larger version, with twice
as many main registers.

DEC'S PDF-10 is in some ways the standard
computer that the IBM 7094 was in the sixties.

scientific

The PDP-10 is excellent for making highly
systems, since it can respond to every input ch
typed by the user.

interactive

aracter

, 1S ,? favorite big computer among research people

and the well-informed. The ARPANET, which connects big
computers at some of the hottest research establishments
is largely built with PDP-lOs. There are PDP-lOs at MIT ’

U. of Utah, Stanford, Yale, Princeton and Engelbart's shop
(see p. JkfC,). The ■Watkins Box (see p.^}) hooks to a 10.

Digital Equipment Corporation, aware that its computer
trademark PDP” connotes minicomputers to the uninformed
now wants the 10 to be called DECsystem-10 rather than PDP
We'll see if that catches on.

Who designed it is not entirely clear,
people attribute it variously to the Model
at MIT, to Gordon Bell, and one Alan Kotok.

I’ve heard
Railroading Club

Originally it was the PDP-6, which appeared about 1964,
and was the first computer to be supplied with a time-sharing
system, which worked from the beginning, it rockily. Now
it's good and solid. DEC’S operating system for it (see p.
45) is called TOPS, but BBN sells one called TENEX, also
highly regarded. The 10 does time-sharing, real-time pro¬
gramming and batch processing simultaneously, swapping to
changeable areas of core memory. (This feature should soon
be available, at last, on IBM computers ("VS2-2").)

PDP-10 time-sharing works even if you don't have a disk,
using DEC tape (DEC'S cute little tapes). Of course, without
disk it's really hobbling, but this capacity is nevertheless
noteworthy.

The PDP-10 has debugging commands which work under time¬
sharing and with all languages, and hugely simplify program¬
ming.

Unlike the IBM 360, whose hardware protection comes in
options, the 10 has seven levels of protection: the user can
specify who may read his files, run them, change them, and do
four other things. The PDP-10 does have job control commands
but they are not even comparable in cumberosity to IBM's JCL
Language (see p. 31), and they are the same for all three
modes of operation: time-sharing, real-time and batch.

The PDP-10 has 36 bits but has instructions to operate
on chunks, or bytes, of any length. It has sixteen main reg¬
isters, as does the 360, but uses them more efficiently.

The PDP-10 also has unlimited indirect addressing: an
instruction can take its effective address from another lo¬
cation, which can in turn say to take its effective address
elsewhere, ad infinitum. For your heavy tight elegant stuff.

Perhaps most important, the 10 has a full set of stack
instructions (see "The Magic of the Stack/' p» 42), allowing
programmers to use multiple stacks for purposes of their own*
(The operating system's own stacks are protected.) Program-
mers do not have to save each other's registers, as on the 360
Programmers are relatively safe from each r

other.

Wit

raP-io

iwrntMtioi

wlVVcr

Some think of the PDP-6 and 10 as a glorified 7094 (with
18 addressing bits, instead of 15). In this case we might
consider the 360 a stripped- down version of the 6, since IBM
threw out the stack and in most models the memory mapping.

PDP-lOs are ordinarily sold where the views of scientists
and engineers are considered important, and comptrollers do
not have first choice. Nevertheless, some say that its busi-
ness-programming facilities (i.e., COBOL, duh) are just as good
as those - J ~ 1 ~ ; ~ *"

"for

as those of companies who claim to have designed computers roi
all purposes." First National City Bank of New York has found
that the PUP-10 makes a splendid banking computer for internal
use, profitable at an internal charge of 53.75 an hour plus
processing charges. Prices for a PDP-10 system with disk start
start about 5500,000, or 515 grand a month, and go up into "be
millions.

However, DEC salesmen are not like IBM's, who can reputed¬
ly sell Eskimos to iceboxes. For one thing, DEC salesmen are
on salary. That fits DEC’S demure, aw-shucks image, but it
doesn't exactly sell big computers.

(For you Firesign Theater fans, the mutterings of the
dying computer on the "Bozos" album are various PDP-10 syste
thingies, artistically juxtaposed.)

-w LV utr iraaiuonal for

machines 1 ike this to have many many

JSTin .M S*”* UghtS f Sh ° Win * Wh ^
was in all the mam registers at any

fraction of a second. But there's Y
really no point in seeing all that
since about all you can tell from It
is whether the computer is going or
no ^ {if J it 's not, the lights are stop-
g*? 1 other high-level impressions.
For that reason some big computers,
beginning with the CDC 6600, started
doing away with the fancy lights and
bringing written messages to the op¬
erator on a CRT scope instead (for
lots more on the glories of CRTs
see the flip side, pp. 2.'^ *

Big computers can have multiple
program followers and sets of regis¬
ters (a program follower and its
" a , 1 , n agisters are together called a
CPU, Central Processing Unit). A
computer with two CPUs, i.'e., two
sets of program followers and regis-
ters to carry the programa6ut, is
called a dual processor; a computer
with more than two CPUs is called a
multi-processor.

Separate independent sections of
core memory may be put in one computer,
allowing separate program followers
and data channels to work at the sane
time. (Note: a "bank" of core memory
is an independent section. Except in
this sense of "core memory bank" or
"core bank," there is no other correct
usage of the layman’s vague term
"memory bank." Computer people only
say "memories," and distinguish fur¬
ther among core, disk, tape, etc.

Note that "data banks" are a separate
issue-- see "Issues," p.f? .)

DINOSAURS?

Many computer people, the author
included, entertain certain doubts a-
bout the long-term usefulness of big
computers, since minicomputers are
cheaper, especially in the long run,
and can actually be in the offices and
homes where people create and use the
information. Big computers are neces¬
sary for time-sharing (see p.45) and
huge "number-crunching" jobs (see
"Grosch's Law," nearby). However, it
will soon be cheaper to put standard¬
ized number-crunching jobs in stand¬
alone or accessory hardware; see "Mi¬
croprocessors," p.

Fans of big computers also argue
that they are necessary for business
programming, but that only means tra ¬
ditional business programming-- non-
mteractive and batch-oriented. For
tomorrow's friendly and clear business
systems, networks of minis may be pref¬
erable. But makers of big computers
may be unwilling to admit this possi¬
bility.

GlW.S(A'U

Minicomputers are so nifty that we may ask
why have big computers at ail. The answer is
that there arc considerable economies, especially
in applications that require many repetitive oper¬
ations and don't need interaction with users.

A hypothesis about the economy of big
computers was formulated a long time ago by
Herbert J.R. Grosch, onetime director of IBM's
Watson Lab and now a heavy detractor of IBM.

Thus it is called Grosch's Law. The idea is
basically that there is a square-law relationship
between a machine's size and its power (narrowly
defined in terms of the coat of millions of operations,
and withou t considering the advantages of interactive
systems or other features which may be of more
ultimate valu^. Anyway, when I asked him recently
for his formulation of Grosch's Law, 1 got the fol¬
lowing:

’ Grosch'a Law (formal): Economy in computing is an the
square root of the speed.

(informal): If you want to do it ten limes
as cheap, you have to do it a hundred times

as fast.

(interpretive): No matter how clever the
hardware boys are. the software boys piss it away’

^BIGGIE

The operator muses at the console of the main computer at the University
of Illinois at Chicago Circle. It is an IBM 370 model 150, which rents for
about $50,000 a month, including all accessories and a dozen or so terminals
— in the parlance of big-computer people, a "medium-sized installation."

This is a big computer.

In principle it’s no different from a small one; but it has
bigger memories, more registers, more program followers. There
are more specialized parts and more things happening at once.
(Thus the term ’’digital computer complex" is sometimes used for
a big computer.) It comes supplied with a monitor program or
operating system (see p. •)$) an d a variety of other utility pro¬
grams and language processors.

Biggies have many ominous and seemingly incomprehensible
things to scare the layman.

For one thing, where is the computer? All you see is a lot
of roaring cabinets. WhicIPis it?

Answer: all of them. "The computer” is divided among the
different cabinets (note diagram and cluster of pictures locating
the operator among them, below). The external devices or peri¬
pherals (see p. S'7) are usually in separate housings. Usually
there is one single box or "mainframe" containing core memory,
main registers, program-following circuitry, etc., as in the ma¬
chine illustrated, but these things don’t have to be in one box,
and sometimes aren't.

Operator's console of
this particular setup.
The operator may use the
keyboard or light-pen
(see p. (iK\* 23) to select
among waiting programs,
submitted by various
programmers and depart¬
ments -

The parts of a computer are set
up to be gotten at , to be refilled and
repaired. Their innards swing open
like refrigerators. Similarly, the
wiring of computers is in separate sec¬
tions or modules ("module" merely be¬
ing today's stylish term for "unit"),
having very orderly connections among
them. Individual circuits are on cir¬
cuit sheets or"cards" which plug in
sideways and may be replaced easily.
There's nothing really computerish
about this, it's merely sensible con¬
struction; but it is traditional in
other fields to build something as a
tangle of wires. (When'TV makers fol¬
low these rational practices, they
call it "space age construction.")

Why are the different parts so
far apart? So there’s room to swing
them open, refill or change them, sit.
down and repair them. Refrigerators
could, and perhaps should, also be
built in separate sections, but it’s
not traditional. Automobiles can’t
be spread out because they have to en¬
dure the jostles of the road. But
computers like this baby aren’t going
anywhere.

Also intimidating is the fact
that you have to step up as you enter
a computer room. That T s because com¬
puter rooms ordinarily have raised
floors, permitting cables to be run
around among the pieces of equipment
without your tripping.

Computer rooms are generally lit
by millions of fluorescent bulbs,
making them garishly bright. This is
simply tradition.

Big computers can have millions
of words of core memory. Moreover,
there are usually several disk drives
and tape drives, as seen in the pic¬
tures, used to hold data and programs.
(Some of the programs are the system
programs, especially the language pro¬
cessors and the operating system--
see p. but other programs and

most of the data belong to the users.)

AN OPERATOR IS NOT A PROGRAMMER

Cindy Woelfer is the day-shift operator of Circle's big computer.
The job mainly consists of changing disks and tapes, starting and stop¬
ping different jobs listed on the scope, and restarting the computer
when the system crashes (gratuitously ceases operation).

Ms. Woelfer, a thoughtful person, says she does not find her job
very stimulating. She can program, but the job doesn't involve pro¬
gramming. It's also a lonely job. Non-systems people, except Mayor
Daley, aren't ordinarily allowed around. About the only people to talk
to are the systems programmers who stop through to look at the scope
and see whether their programs are up next.

minicomputer or mini

Traditionally, any computer hav¬
ing an architecture (memory and
main registers) of 18 bits or
less. Lately, unfortunately,
some people have been adver¬
tising their 24-bit and even
32-bit computers as minis. This
is just confusing.

(They base this on the fact
that ‘’minicomputer" has also re¬
ferred to a machine sold without
a lot of programs. But that's
really a separate issue.)
microprocessor

Two-level computer (see p. Y*/ ) •
microcomputer

Crummy term apparently being used
to mean any tiny computer, regard¬
less of its structure. Thus all
computers will be "microcomputers”
in a few years. This clarifies
nothing as to their structure or
use.

midi computer

Remember midi skirts? Well, this
term has been used for computers
larger than 16 bits or faster than
usual, by people seeking to give
the impression that their machines
are bigger than minis and less than
biggies. Even the PDP-10 (a genuwine
biggie) has sometimes been called
a midi.

A product called Cling Free
comes scented in a spray can,
for preventing static in your
laundry-- is said to eliminate
static electricity in carpeted
computer rooms. Spray it all
over the rug, especially near
the computer, and you won’t
zapp the computer with sparks
from your fingers.

WHER5 T«6Ef ty[.

HEY, SOME MINI RENTALS MAY BE REASONABLE

Nova minicomputers are leasable from:

Rental Electronics, Inc.

(a subsidiary of Pepsico)

99 Hartwell Ave.

Lexington, MA 02173

for as little as $250/mo., long-term .

is at the bottom of p. 7_5,

A long but incomplete list of minicomputer manufacturers

-B^Kf OF OKI & NUVJI v*-?TL [-uf o*u*| Tetehjpt

chimneying and twisting to squeeze through
to his goal— not his body, of course, but
his program.

This is a PDP-11, one of the world's best-designed minicomputers (see p. ‘flu)
The PDP-11 is a 16-bit machine. Shown is Model 45, the fastest PDP-11, which
has various special features. Stripped, with 4K of core memory (that's 4096
locations), it costs about $13 grand. A smaller PDP-11 goes for some $5000.

A minicomputer simply means a
small computer, no different in
principle from the big ones (see
next spread), and it can do all the
same things except as limited by
speed and memory capacity.

(Mind, we are talking about
real computers , not the little cal¬
culators you hold in your hand that
just do arithmetic. A real compu¬
ter is one which works on stored
programs and all kinds of data,
working not merely on numbers but
on such other things as text, mu¬
sic and pictures if supplied with
appropriate programs; see flip side.)

There is some argument over
what constitutes a minicomputer;
basically we will say it's any com¬
puter with a word length of.18 bits
or less (see "Binary Patterns," p.
<2-7) • (Some companies, like Data-
craft and Interdata, are trying to
peddle their worthy computers as
"minicomputers" even though they're
24 and 32 bits, respectively, but
that's very odd. Interdata says
any computer under ten thousand is
a mini-- which means all computers
will be minis by and by; a vexing
thing to do to the term.)

Traditionally minicomputers
come with much less. In the old
days pretty much all the programs
you got with it were an assembler
(see p. 35) and a debugger (see p.
Jo) and'a Fortran compiler (see p.

if you were lucky. Today,
though, with minis having highly
built-up software like (see p fio-ifZ
for descriptions) the PDP-8, the
PDP-11 and the Nova, you can get a
lot of different assemblers, to¬
gether with Fortran, BASIC, and a
little disk or cassette operating
system (see p. H&) to make your
life a little easier.

The idea of owning a computer
may* seem strange to some people,
but with prices falling as they are
it makes perfect sense. Numerous
individuals own minis, and as the
price continues to drop the number
will shoot up. For several families
with children to pool together and
buy one for the kids makes a lot of
sense. One friend of mine has an 8,
another is contemplating an 11.

(I've been trying to get my own for
years; perhaps this book...) Any¬
how, the general price range is now
$3000 to $6000 plus accessories,
and that's dropping fast. Rental
is usually a great mistake: prices
are very high and after six months
or so you'll have paid for it with¬
out owning it. (But names of rental
places will be found in this book,
and some of-them may offer good ar¬
rangements.) Minis may now be had
in quantity for $1000 each-- price
of the PDP-8A in May 1974-- and soon
that will be the consumer price.

Unfortunately, the price of the
computer itself is dropping faster
than that of the accessories, such
as the basic terminal you'll need,
which still weighs in at $1000-5000.
Moreover, as soon as you want to do
anything serious you'll need a disk
(starting around $4500) or at least
a cassette memory (starting around
$1500). But these prices too will
come way down as the consumer market
opens.

Some of us minicomputer freaks
see little real need for big computers.
Minicomputers are splendid for inter¬
active and "good-guy" systems (see
p. 13) ; ns personal machines, to han¬
dle typing and bookkeeping; even for
business systems, if you recognize
the value of working out your own in
BASIC or, say, TRAC Language.

Minicomputers are being put in¬
side all manner of other equipment
to handle complex control. (However,
for repetitive simple tasks, the lat¬
est thing is microprocessors (see p.
if), which cost less but are harder
to program.)

Minicomputers are now being found
in highschools; active marketing to
highschools is now being done by both
DEC and Hewlett-Packard.

Children's museums in Brooklyn
and Boston have recently obtained PDP-
11s for the kids to interact with. In
the Brooklyn case, the computer will
even demonstrate the exhibit and help
the child discover things about it in
ways worked out by Gordon Pask (see d.

In the future, networks of minis
may be the systems to offer low-cost
information services to the home (for
speculations, see p. £7 )-
But minis will alsi start to make big¬
ger and bigger incursions on the terri¬
tory of the big machines. For instance,
one group proposes a time-sharing sys¬
tem which will simply consist of Novas
interconnected in a ring, the so-called
STAR-RING, which will supposedly com¬
pete with big time-sharing.

Here 's that selfsame PDP-11
in its overall setting. With
peripherals shown, plus the
magnificent Vector General
display (shown later on in
book, p. tH 3l <5 elsewhere),
this setup cost well over a
hundred grand. (This is the
Circle Graphics Habitat, oth¬
erwise known as the Chemistry
Department Computer, U. Illi¬
nois at Chicago Circle. Why
do chemists need such things?
See p. £*\2l.)

The good ol' PDP-8, perhaps
the most popular minicomputer
(12 bits). Full PDP-Bs now
cost about $3000, "kits" less.
Shown here with a Sykes cas¬
sette tape deck — a nice,
rather reliable unit — and a
screen display (see pp^ZZ^Z) *
Courtesy Princeton University .
<S R.E.S.I.S.T.O.R.S. (see p.yj.

Kids love computers.
They belong together.
This lad flips panel
switches on a Nova,
perhaps the third most
popular mini after the
8 and 11 (16 bits ; see
P .

This la what the program look* like In the
computer's core memory (A printout
like the following is called a machine -

language Hating )

Since all the addresses are filled In, this
program is said to be In absolute
binary . If they weren't filled in, It
would be called relocatable binary .

Machine language listings come in different
flavor*. A binary listing (or dump )
la generally in ones and aeroes. An
octal Hating groups the bits by threes
and substitutes the numbers zero
through seven for the different com¬
binations of three bits The other
main kind, the hexadecimal listing
or dump (an IBM thing), group* the
bits by fours and substitutes the num¬
ber* 0-9 and the letters A to F, for
the sixteen different combinations of
four bits.

This is what the program looks like when
you set It up for the Assembler,
which la the eaaier way .

A program laid out like this la called an
Assembly Listing. Studying it may
help you debug (see p. ?!)).

An easy-to- remember alphabetical code la
used to represent each final Instruc
tion desired. Such an abbreviation
ia called a mnemonic ; usually they're
more cryptic. The mnemonics ere
turned by the assembler Into the
binary opcode.

You don’t have to know the actual addresses
in core memory, you just use alpha¬
betical names or labels, and the As¬
sembler figures out where they really
go and puts in the binary addresses.

Desired numbers, such as 9, are plugged

into the address pans of Instructions.

YOUR OWN COMMENTS (here set off with
slashes) can stay here loo.

In this FIDO example, the Assembler follows
two common practices; it recognizes
a label because It ends in a comma,
and recognizes a comment because it
begins with a slash.

(jhl-AO. «,

ooo

oox

0X0

oxx

xoo

xox

xxo

XXX

oox ooo
oox oox

OOX 0X0

oox oxx
oox xoo
oox xox
oox xxo

OOX XXX

oxo ooo
oxo oox

0X0 0X0

oxo oxx
oxo xoo
oxo xox
oxo xxo

0X0 XXX

oxx ooo
oxx oox
oxx oxo
oxx oxx
oxx xoo
oxx xox
oxx xxo
oxx XXX
xoo ooo
xoo oox
xoo oxo
xoo oxx
xoo xoo
xoo xox
xoo xxo

XOO XXX

xox ooo
xox oox
xox qxo
xox oxx
xox xoo
xox xox
xox xxo
xox XXX
xxo ooo
xxo oox

XXO 0X0

xxo oxx
xxo xoo
xxo xox
xxo xxo

XXO XXX
XXX ooo
XXX oox
XXX oxo
XXX oxx

xxx xoo

XXX XOX

xxx xxo
xxx xxx
x ooo ooo
X ooo oox
x ooo 0X0
X ooo oxx
x ooo xoo
X ooo xox
x ooo xxo
X ooo xxx
x oox ooo
X oox oox
X oox 0X0
X oox oxx
X oox xoo
x oox xox
X oox xxo
X OOX xxx
X 0X0 ooo
X 0X0 OOX
X 0X0 0X0
X 0X0 OXX

xoxo xoo
X oxo xox
X 0X0 xxo
xoxo xxx

C°Nri\jr$

Bt jj

.. —9

xxxxxooooooo
xxoooooooooo
ooooxxooxxox
xoxoooooooox
xxooooooooox
ooooxxoxooxx
xoxoooxxooxo
xxxxxooooooo
xxooxoooooox <

XX 00X0000X00

xxooxoooxoox
xxooooooooxo
ooooxxoxooxo
xoxoooxxoxxx
xxxxxooooooo
XXooxoooooxo
xxooxooooxxo
xxooxoooxoxo
ooxooxoxoxxx
ooxooxoxoxox
oxxoooxoooox
ooxooxooxxxo
oxxoooxooxxx
oxxoooxxxxxo
xxxxxooooooo
ooxooxoxoxxx
ooxooxoxoxxo
oxxoooxoxxox
oxxoooxxoooo
oxxoooxxxxox
ooxooxooxxxo
oxxoooxoxoxx
oxxooxoooooo
oooooooooooo
ooooxxoxooxx
xoxoooxooxox
xox oooxxxxoo
ooooxxoxoooo
xoxoooxoxxxx
oooooooooooo
ooooxxooxxxx
xoxoooxoxxxx
xxxxxooooooo
oooooooooooo
ooxooxooxxxo
oooooooooooo
xoxooxooooox
ooxooxooxxxo
oooooooooooo
xoxooxooooox
ooxooxooxxxo
xxooxoooooox
xxooxooooxox
xxooxoooxoox
xoxoooooooox
00X00000 xxxo
XX00X00000X0

xxooxooooxxo

xxooxoooxoxo

xoxoooooooox

xxxxxooooooo

oooooooooooo

ooxooxooxxxo

oooooooooooo

xxxxxooooooo

ooxooxoxoxxx

ooxooxoxooox

ooooxxoxoxoo

xoxooxooxoxx

xxxxxooooooo

ooxooxoxoxxx

00X00X0X0000

OXXOOXOXOXXX

XOXOOOOOOOOX

OXXOOXOXOXXX

XOXOOOOXOOXO

OOOOOOOOOOOO

OOOOOOOOOOOX

0000000000X0

OOOOOOOOOOXX

000000000X00

OOOQOOOOOXOX

00000000X0X0

ooooooooxxxx

xxoooooooooo

xxooxooooooo

oooooooooooo

&elt\ I Ik

START.

CHKCL,

ROUND.

IN1.0

PAST,

IN2.9

OUT2.0

OUT1, t

INCHR,
OUT1P1.0

ADMIN.

AD2TEN.

AD If HR,
OUT1P2. A
IN2P1. 8

0UT2P1,0
INCN.

STORN,
ZERO. 0

CLEAR
INPUT 0
TEST ZERO
JUMP CHKCL
INPUT 1
TEST NINE
JUMP ADMIN
CLEAR
OUTPUT 1
OUTPUT 4
OUTPUT 9
INPUT 2
TEST FIVE
JUMP AD2TEN
CLEAR
OUTPUT 2
OUTPUT 6
OUTPUT 10
ADD N
ADD INPUT
STORE INI
ADD ONE
STORE IN2
STORE IN2P1
CLEAR
ADD N

ADD OUTPUT
STORE 0UT1
STORE 0UT1P1
STORE OUT1P2
ADD ONE
STORE OUT2
STORE 0UT2P1

TEST NINE
JUMP PAST
JUMP AD10HR
TEST THREE
JUMP INCHR

TEST TWO
JUMP INCHR
CLEAR

ADD ONE

JUMP INCN
ADD ONE

JUMP INCN
ADD ONE
OUTPUT 1
OUTPUT S
OUTPUT 9
JUMP CHKCL
ADD ONE
OUTPUT 2
OUTPUT 6
OUTPUT 10
JUMP CHKCL
CLEAR

ADD ONE

CLEAR
ADD N
ADD FOUR
TEST FTEEN
JUMP STORN
CLEAR
ADD N
ADD THREE
STORE N
JUMP CHKCL
STORE N
JUMP ROUND

/CLOCK IS 1/0 SLOT #0000000.

/A NEW MINUTE?

/NO. CHECK CLOCK AGAIN.

/YES. READ MINUTE SLOT OF 1ST WATCH.

/IS IT A 9?

/NO. GO TO MINUTE INCREMENTER
/YES. SET EACH
/TEN-MINUTE DIGIT
/TO ZERO.

/CHECK TEN-MINUTE DIGIT.

/NEW HOUR?

/NO, GO TO TEN-MINUTE INCREMENTER.

/YES, SET EACH
/TEN-MINUTE DIGIT
/TO ZERO.

/GET CLOCK-NUMBER COUNTER
/AND FORM INPUT INSTRUCTION
/PUT IT WHERE IT BELONGS.

/FORM OTHER INPUT INSTRUCTION.

/PUT IT WHERE IT BELONGS.

/HERE TOO.

/GET COUNTER AGAIN.

/AND FORM OUTPUT INSTRUCTION.

/PUT IT HERE WHERE IT BELONGS.

/AND HERE.

/HERE TOO.

/FORM OTHER OUTPUT INSTRUCTION.

/PUT IT WHERE IT BELONGS.

/HERE TOO.

/BECOMES "INPUT N"

/IS HOUR DIGIT A 9?

/NO. TEST AGAIN

/YES, GO FLIP 10-HOUR DIGIT

/IS HOUR DIGIT A 3?

/NO. GO INCREMENT HOUR.

/BECOMES "INPUT N+l."

/IS TEN-HOUR COUNTER A TWO?

/NO. INCREMENT HOUR NORMALLY

/YES. IT WAS 23:59, SO SET

/TIME TO 01:00. "OUTPUT N + l" IS HERE.

/SET AC TO 1.

/AND "OUTPUT N" HERE.

/GO INCREMENT CLOCK-NUMBER COUNTER
/ADD 1 TO HOUR
/BECOMES "OUTPUT N".

/CO INCREMENT CLOCK-NUMBER COUNTER
/ADD 1 TO MINUTE DIGIT.

/AND PUT IT
/IN ALL

/THE MINUTE DIGITS.

/THEN GO BACK TO C LOCK-WATCHING .

/ADD 1 TO TEN-MINUTE DIGIT
/AND PUT IT
/IN ALL

/THE TEN-MINUTE DIGITS.

/THEN GO BACK TO CLOCK-WATCHING.

/FIRST CLEAR

/HOUR DIGIT (BECOMES "OUTPUT N”)

/THEN GET TEN-HOUR DIGIT
/AND ADD 1 TO IT.

/BECOMES "OUTPUT N+t".

/ROUTINE TO GET NEXT CLOCK NUMBER .

/ADDING FOUR TO CLOCK NUMBER
/TAKES US TO NEXT CLOCK.

/HAVE WE RUN OUT OF CLOCKS (N-15J?

/NO. GO STORE N AND RETURN

/YES, SET

/N=3

/AND RETURN

/TO START OF PROGRAM

/(WE'VE DONE CHECKING CLOCKS).

/STORE NEW CLOCK-NUMBER COUNTER

/AND SERVICE NEXT CLOCK. END OF MAIN PROGRAM.

/ THESE ARE CONSTANTS.

TWO. 2
THREE. 3
FOUR, 4
FIVE. 5
NINE. 9
FTEEN. 15
INPUT. 6000B
OUTPUT, 6200B
N. f

/RAW INPUT INSTRUCTION. (OCTAL)
/RAW OUTPUT INSTRUCTION. (OCTAL)
/COUNTER FOR WHICH CLOCK WE'RE ON.

IP THI5

TO ©vet

Gal ^

Ten minutes after starting to program in
Machine Language you will probably want Assem¬
bly Language.

It's a pain trying to get ail the ones and
zeroes right. (£m> a, itr

-)•>

It's a pain trying to keep track of binary
numbers for where things are stored.

SO: let's give them alphabetical names.
That’s assembly language. (And the conversion
program we put our alphabetical into, to turn
them back into the binary patterns that rosily
run the machine-- that conversion program is
called the Assembler.)

An assembler is a direct and non-iricky
translator, intended mainly to handle the details
of exact transposition between instruction code¬
words and the exactly corresponding machine-
language program that you intend.

IT WORKS LIKE THIS: The assembler
scans through the assembly-language program,
testing the succeasive alphabetical characters.
After finding the key punctuation marks or
delimiters (shown as comma and slash for the
FIDO assembler), it scans for the alphabetical
lnatruction mnemonics, and translates them by
a table in core memory into the corresponding
binary codes. (It ignores everything on a line
after a slash , which is lucky, since in the
comments you may use words which are the same
as instruction mnemonics.)

The assembler also counts the instructions,
and (starting wherever you say) figures where
In core memory the instructions (and any data
or spaces you put In) go. Then it makes a list
of these addresses, called a symbol table (also
called a name list at less elegant places).

An assembler is the simplest form of
compiler (see p.30). Basically it translates an
assembly-language program, which cannot be run
directly, into a binary program which can.

Then from this symbol table It fill* the
resulting binary addresses into the binary com¬
mands of the program.

Aren't you glad you don't have to?

Generally the assembler then sends out
the binary program to some external device,
auch «s a disk memory or paper tape punch.

Then it can be put Into core memory when you
want to run it.

(You can put a program into core memory
one bit at a time through the front-panel switches;
but nobody likes doing this excopt for teeny pro¬
gram*.)

(Note: an assembler for one computer (say
the PDP-fl) that runs on a different computer
(say. the 360) Is called a croaa assembler.)

\\vti you

p'fl* N'l 4uff.

"Assembly language programming is good for the soul."

5 ^

VRjSrwrot*

There ia a certain folk hero whom the
people all call Bucky. tt ie aaid that he wears
three wriatwatches: one for where he ie now.
one for where he will be next, and one that
teiu what time it ie at hla home.

Well now. Here'e an example of a little
problem on which to try our FIDO computer

Let's wire up a magic wriatwatch for
Bucky the Folk Hero, one that will use a teeny
FIDO on a chip (the coming thing), attached to
three rows of numerical readouts (like those
on pocket calculators).

This application is not so absurd as you
might think.

It la obviously quite simple in principle.

It will let us see some of the ways that
the rock-bottom machine languages of computers
are used.

Ajjwr w

Naturally this got saved for last, and
what ia presented here shows it.

The example was meant to be a case of
not-very-numerical programming that would
ahow the abstractness of it all. The program
Itself has no intrinsic quality related to the
problem; that much should be visible.

Anyhow, I programmed this myself a few
weeks ago in the FIDO language, and was very
pleased with it, but then discovered a couple
of appalling bugs. As time closed in on this
project 1 asked my friend Mike O'Brien to code
the program, and he kindly consented, taking
time out of his previous weekend plans. Here
is Mike's program, for which 1 am grateful.

HowEVer, after it was set in type. Mike
realized that It too has some gross Haws and
would not work as here presented. We thought
of having a chocolate chip cookie contest for
corrections, sending out chocolate chip cookies
to entrants fixing it up, but we don’t have
such • computer and we wouldn't run the pro¬
gram if we had one anyw ay, so see if you can
get the basic'idea of it, and if you arc a real
wise guy fix the program for your own satis¬
faction, and that will be that.

The basic idea is that we have a FIDO,
presumably on a single integrated circuit chip,
attached to thirteen external devices (or periph¬
erals, or input-output devices, or I/O devices
or whatever). These devices are a timer or
clock . which reaches zero once per minute--
thls Is a computer clock, meaning a timer, not
something that people can read-- and the three
rows of numerical readouts that are the desired
Superwalch.

For simplicity's sake we assume here that
each numeral is interfaced to do either input or
output; thus the FIDO computer can ask any
given numeral what it says, and change its con¬
tents .

The finished Wriatwatch ia going to give
time on a twentyfour-hour basis, not twelve, like
st NASA and suchlike places. After 12: S9 comes
13: 00. After 23:59 cornea 01:00.

* t

The bulk of the program is occupied with
tasting the numerals and changing them. How¬
ever. in proportions of activity, the poor thing
ia going to spend moat of ita time saying. "I*
it time yet? Is it time yet? la it time yet?"
(That’s the second, third and fourth inBtruction.)

Because the FIDO selects the particular
input-output device with the last seven bits of
an input or output instruction, this has been
done with "address modification" arithmetic:
creating an output instruction to addreaa a par¬
ticular device by adding the instruction to the
name of the device This ia an ancient 7nS~
honorable programming trick.

In several cases, the program chooses a
device to examine, or fill, by taking • blank
input or output instruction (kept et locations
X OXO XOX and X OXO XXO, respectively) end
in the AC, to a counting number that
ia being used to step around In the array of
numerals. (This counting number is "N."
stored in location X OXO XXX.) (These Instruc¬
tions ware put into the slots in octal form, as
end "62MB" respectively The elashea
are meant to distinguish is roes from Ohs . The
*B" «l the end (in the aseembly Hating) means
that the assembler is supposed to trenalate these
numbers to Binary, taking them three bits at a
time: « M i cornea out to XXO OOO OOO OOO.)

V ft, goe r

Khtl j*y, a

66-66 b;i&

-MVI« IW1I 91*'ft

7 („ e

0 0:0 0 HEXT

Bivxt xwt srvit* *

fi, u io ^

O 0:0 O tfwAe.

*S5 JR? *22

*!(HT5

Note that in thia flowchart

A «r -3

aeans, “stuff the number 3
into the variable A." A
variable is a named location
in core memory.

0 (ITW0> 1

W\RT

Tt ST ;

K^U';

M'TSk

ta:

Anyhow, what the program is really doing,
when it finds the timer has reached zero, is.
testing whether the rightmost digit is s nine.

(It only has to test one, since minutes are the
same round the world.) If it’s not nine, it
just adds one to each-- a part of the program
called ADMIN, starting at XXO OXO. If it's
nine, however, it sets the final digits all to
zero, and then testa the tens digit to see if it's
a five , meaning the end of an hour. (The num¬
ber five hoa been ingenuously stored in a loca¬
tion which Mike has called FIVE, which assem¬
bled to slot number X 0X0 0X0. If you look
there, you will see that the slot does, indeed,
contain the binary pattern for the number 5.)

What a pity there is no time to take you on
a guided tour of this profound, magnificent pro¬
gram. If you dig this sort of thing, however,
you might just be able to dope it out.

kf. At,
H v m
1

: r. .. ti»*

vW-TV ",

L . ..._I s j '■t r> <

•» ■// j -I'M

in n* :
Cket IKf.

Uf
*r 14
to. 4 3

ua|e»>

1 MU IfOW.

Mika 0’Brian 'a
alighthj diegruntlad
poataoript to the program.

A UiHD-DP

CR£>SSGOOfct> fUT-tUE

We look at lest at what really happen!
inside a given computer. It muet be a specific
computer became there la no single Inner lan¬
guage tor all computer!. For simplicity's aake
Hike moat Introductory texts) we hereby pre-
aent a fictitious machine.

TflC

* flbo*

(Faithful Jnatrument. Domesticated and Obliging).

The FIDO la a twelve-bit machine. The
main register (it baa only one) ie twelve bile
long, and every memory alot la twelve bita long.

Every inatructlon la twelve bita long;
every data word la twelve bita long, though of
courae much longer plecea of data can be put
together by teking more than one twelve-bit

Some rudimentary inatructione of the FIDO
are Hated In a neerby box. The inatructione of
the FIDO are of two typea; plain ones that Juat
use the main register (like CLEAR), and the
divided ones. which select e memory tlol or
output device. On the FIDO these are divided
Into an operation code ( opcode ) of live bile--
the bite that tell the program follower what the
operation ia to be; and an ad dream of seven
bita, a pacifying which memory alot (or external
device) la to be operated on.

These seven bits allow exactly 128 differ¬
ent patterns, (from OOOOOOO to XXXXXXX).
which means we can select among exactly 128
different memory slots. (See Binary Patterns.

p.>5.)

The Fido cornea with one row of lights
and switches; the row of lights can show tha
contents of any specific working register or
memory slot. When the computer Is stopped,
this la helpful for debugging program* (see p.

3 ».)

Ah, If only we could tell you all about the
FIDO hare! Its many more instructions. The
option bits in the commands that allow fancy
variations, or the option bits in the interfaces,
spoken of earlier, which allow the program to
give different commands to external devices.

But leCa get on with a program for
FIDO. Thrill to the pulsating rhylhma of,

<^0

|ASid c* thc njy> O nfuitg-

f*r t revt.lyt'**' fa Si*

pattern selecting
where to perform
operation)

i&ty

o°*2S>

CLEAR AC

This Instruction c
filled with xeroes.

AC. Result remains in the AC. Wheteve
wss in the memory before la still Ihere.
This instruction Is slso used to bring s
new psttern to the AC, copying It from II
specified memory location; but you have
CLEAR the AC first, so you're sdding it

This instruction copies the cooler
of the AC to the specified memory local
Whatever was In the memory location ia

INPUT*

This Instruction copies the contents
of a specified device register to the AC.

OUTPUT*

This instruction copies the contents
of the AC to a specified device register.

This instruction makes the program
follower take its next Instruction at the
specified address and go on from there.

TEST. SKIP IF EQUAL**

This is a common test instruction,
permitting the program to branch depen¬
ding on various conditions. The contents
of the AC are compared with the specified
core memory location. If they are not the
same, the program continues and tskes the
next instruction in Ihe normal fashion. IF
the two patterns are the same, the pro¬
gram follower SKIPS the next instruction
and goes on lo the one after.

For instance, that middle instruc-
in can be s JUMP instruction, taking
e program to a whole nother part of
re memory and ■ new aeries of events.

■tighU^r ‘"•'ruction, h . v . ,

I lf you want information c
language and asaembly languej

iNsmiioKj LWr

An occult aspect of computer design la the
matter of how to pack into the eo-many bits of
sn Instruction word all tha options tha programme

For no particular reason tha instruction
select bita are usually on the left, the address
bits on the right, and option bits (no room for
them In this book, unfortunately) In the middle.

The number of bits in the address deter¬
mine* the number of places in the memory that
the programmer can choose among. 15 bits in
the address means a choice of 12.768 memory lo¬
cations. 7 bits means • choice of only 128.

(See "Binary Patterns." p.33 .)

Generally a specific computer has more tha
one instruction layout.

Deciding whst the instruction layouts ire
to be hinges on the architectural design of the
computer (see p.3i ) and the i net ruction-aet.

It all gate worked out together.

It's ultimately a matter of design elegancs.
but the consequences are very concrete. An
elegant instruction-set Is easy to use and there¬
fore saves a lot of time and money. (Anyone
interested in studying the matter might want to
compare the PDP-11, a 16-bit computer with a
brilliantly designed inatructlon-set. with some
other 16-bit comouter.)

The FIDO is nothing but a stripped-down
version of that beloved family pooch of computerdom,

% PDP-?.

If you buy a PDP-8 from Digital Equipment
Corporation, you get all thla and more. (Except
for the external devicea.) And the PDP-8. of
course, allows much bigger memoriaa than 128
slots, but that’s too complicated for here.) Arf.

are what the computer operates on deep down. "Binary"
Just means that only two symbols are used (Just as
■decimal" men* that ten symbols sre used). Patterns
of binary symbols happen to be electrically convenient,
so that's how computers sre built, but thst would
chsngc If some more convenient act of symbols came

Binary patterns are very systematic and easy
to deal with. Consider the number of binary symbols
you can have in Just four spaces. **LET'S USE THE
LETTERS X AND O, AND PUT THEM IN ALPHABETICAL
ORDER. SO YOU'LL SEE THAT WE RE TALKING ABOUT
PATTERNS . RATHER THAN NUMBERS .

OOOO
O OjO X

O O x|o
o o xjx

0[X O O
O X O X
O X X o
J> X X X
X o o o
X 0 O X
X 0 X o
X O X X
X X o o
X X O X
X X X o
xjx X X

You can »ae that the pattern repasts In certain
inter rating ways. Each column repeats Itself as you
reed down; adding a naw position to tha left doubles
tha number of possible patterns you can have to tha

These are tha Infamous "bits" you have hoard
of. Aa you can see, thara Is nothing hard or compli¬
cated about them Tha number of bita In a thing
are the number of spaces which can be either X or

Now, tha most basic fact about any computer
la its wor* length : that la. tha number of apace*
to a standard memory slot of that computer.

A *U-Wt computer' uixa (ha PDP-I) has memory
weeds that are all twelve bite long A "18-bit
ooavMJtar’ (ilka the PDP-11) has memory words that
are all 18 bite long .

Actually computers with small word lengths
like these ore called minicomputers. Big computers
have much bigger word lengths. The IBM 360
has a 32-bil word length. The Control Data 6600
has a 60-bit word.

Now. It is an interesting fact lhat not only
are computer memories divided up into slots, or
locations, of equal length.

but each of Ihcae location* ha* an address, that
la, a number by which the contenls of Ihe location
can be found. And these numbers are binary.

Many forma of Information are kept in binary
patterns which era not numbers. For inslanca.
letters of the alphabet ore usually stored aa 8-
blt patterns.

However, we will have to stop using these
X'a and O'*. It's not really done . *0 we will
switch to the more usual way oT writing binary
patterns with l's and zeroes. (Apologies to readers
who hste numbers; but remember that these patterns,
while we may write them out as l's and zeroes,
may represent wholly non-numerlcal kinds of
information J ~That means tha letter Q ia

but lt'a still tha letter Q.

Of course, bits may also represent numerical
information. And so we peas on to

This brings up some interesting facts.

CERTAIN NUMBERS ARE SPECIAL because
they are the number of things lhat can be specified
by a certain number of bits.

Special number

128 seven bits .

256 eight bits

512 nine bit*

1026 ten bits

("ONE K" Is 1024; memories and everything
else come in K'a, or multiples of 1024.)

Actually tha term “k," standing for "kilo-," should
mean one thousand. and the term BK. or Binary K.
la used by fussy people to stand for tha vary important
nesrby number 1024. But computer people generally
use expressions ending In K for Ihe following special
numbers:

THAT'S HOW MANY

NUMBER combinations fit in

2048 ("2K") eleven bits

4096 ("4K") twelve bita

8192 ("8K") thirteen bite

16.384 ("16K") fourteen bita

33.768 ("32K") fifteen bits.

BINARY NUMBERS.

These are the same old binary patterns,
but when we decide to treat them a* numbers,
they are binary numbers.

Let's count. Note that these are tha asmr
combinations of bite as before, merely put In the
more usual notation

Above this number they Increase very fast, and
we generally have to lock them up. but the idea ia
this; tha number of bite used to select something
He.Ha toe number of things you can select among .
For Instance. 1/you heve a computer memory with
32K different locations. you need fifteen bita exactly
to specify a location to memory.

Here are some ramifications:

Aa you observe, the higher numu... need more
and more bits to hold them

• The word length of a computer determines
how large a number 11 can hold. A computer with
a twelve-bit word can only hold a number up to
4083 In one memory location (since we use 000 000
000 000, Ihe first comb torn lion, to stand for zero);
if wo went to use longer numbers we heva to aet
aside two or more word locations per number. (A
16-blt computer can hold a number up to 83. WS to
one memory location.)

. i„ designing date structures. If you use
binary codes (rather than. say. alphabetical characters),
you heva to allow enough bits for ell the alternatives
that might turn up

• In the design o
(or e colnputer, therefoi
aside to specify an eddi
that instruction can salt

tha wired-to Instructions
a. 1h# number of bits sat
isa In core determines whother
;l (rum Ihe whole memory.

or Just a perl of it.

Every computer le wired to accept • spe¬
cific system of commends. When Iheee commend*

■ re atored tn the computer's memory, end the
computer'? program follower fete to them, they
cause it to respond directly by electronic re fie*.
This is celled machine language, the very lan¬
guage of the machine Itself

In moat available computers the machine
languages are binary, meaning composed of only
two alternative symbols. Binary because It’e s
sensible way of organizing the machine's struc¬
ture; It permits programs to be reduced to s
single common form of information , snd permits
programs to be stored in binary memory. Each
individual instruction or command ordinarily
occupies one memory slot, though some compu¬
ters have commands of varying length.

Different computers have different machine
languages, but the Instructions of all computers
are basically similar. Big computers have mors
commands, with more variations, and carry
them out faster; but those variations are just
artra ways of saving steps, not qualitatively
different features.

These deep-down operations ARE ALL THE
THINGS THE COMPUTER EVER DOES. However,
in their combinations theae Instructions can be
woven into chains and diadem* of complex action*.

ALL COMPUTER PROGRAMS ARE EVEN¬
TUALLY WRITTEN OR ENACTED IN THE MACHINE'S
PARTICULAR BINARY LANGUAGE.

Now. it is entirely possible to write your
programs st this level, considering slid arran¬
ging rock-bottom commands. This is called
machine-language programming (and assembly
programming; see examples a little later on).
Indeed, working at this level is very highly
respected in some quarters. Others avoid It,

This Is a very serious matter of taste snd what
you're working on.

Higher-level languages, seen on earlier
pages, have more convenient forms for people,
but must be translated, either ahead of time or
on a running basis, to the bottom-most codes
that make things happen ih the machine. All of
them are built out of machine language. Writ¬
ing the language processors, programs that
enact or translate these higher-level languages,
is considered a black art. (See p.J#.)

Every programmable device ha# a "machine
language," or rock bottom code system that acti¬
vates the thing directly; its program follower
responds electrically to these codes, and enacts
them one instruction st a time.

True computers are programmable devices
that can modify their own lnatructions. change
their sequence of operation* and do other versa¬
tile stuff.

1V« W* Wb

I XOOA»)twostkwX^

Laearwj T) []

Computers are basically alika. Ignore their
appearances; a roomful of roaring cabinets may
have a great dtal In common with a small blinking
bo*; Indeed, they may have the same architecture,
or structure, and therefore be the same computer.

The structure of computers. In their glorious
similarities and fascinating differences, ia called
computer architecture .

(For the architecture of a beginner's com¬
puter, see p.5>; for the architecture of some
famous computers, see^p.N 4 "'} ■)

Computer architecture covers three main
things; registers (places where something happens
to Information); memories (places where nothing
happens to information): their Interconnections;
and machine language, all the bottom-level inatruc-
tiona (for this last aee "Rock Bottom," p. 52,)

REGISTERS AND MEMORIES

Computers are made, basically, of two
things; registers and memories . A register is
where something happens to information; a memory
ia where nothing happens to information. Let's
go over that slowly.

A register is a place where something
happen# to information; the information can be
flipped around, tested, changed by arithmetic,
or whatever. (We noted earlier that registers
are what connect a computer to its accessories.

They are also principal parts of the computer
itself.)

A memory is a place where nothing hap¬
pens to Information. A program puts the infor¬
mation there, and there it stays till some pro¬
gram pulls it out again or replaces it.

A main or general register (often called
the accumulator . for no good reason) is where
the program brings things to be worked on,
tested, compared, added to and so on. There
ear be several of them in a computer.

Other registers perform other functions in
the computer; a given computer's design, or srchi -
techture , is largely the arrangement of registers
and the operations that take place between them.

The reason we don’t Just have all registers —
and no memories at all-- is that registers tradi¬
tionally cost more than memories. (However, some
machines are being tried that have ell working
registers instead of memory . See STARAN, p. 43 . >

Memories come in all sizes and speeds.

So lota of computers have big slow memories,
such as disk memories, along with their small
faat memories.

A memory consists of numerous holding
places or storage locations , each holding one
standerd piece of information for the computer,
a word having a specific number of bits (see p.

.) We must stress; a "COMPUTER WORD"

HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH ENGLISH WORDS OR
ALPHABETICAL CHARACTERS. The term refers
to a specific machine's standard memory slot,
having a fixed number of bit positions.

One important reason for this standardiza¬
tion is that each holding place, or memory loca¬
tion, can be given a number or address . If
every slot in the memory ha* an address, infor¬
mation can be stored in specific places:

snd gotten beck out of specific places;

A core memory haa a definite rhythm or
cycle , into which it divides the passing time.

The memory cycle of a core memory ia so Im¬
portant that its duration is often called the
cycle time of the confter. A request to the core
memory made at the beginning of the cycle
ia honored et the end of the cycle. Core cycles
are very fast, being these days about one
microsecond, or millionth of a second.

A core memory can only perform one eel
(store or fetch) during one memory cycle.

Core cycles during which nothing la
requested of the memory simply go by.

One lest point about core memories. The
number which specifies an address to the mem¬
ory is a binary pattern-- Just like all the other
information (see "Binary Patterns," p. "S'i ).

(Or more exactly, whatever binary pattern is sup¬
plied to the memory as the address to store or
from which to fetch, that pattern will be treated
as the address to store or from which to fetch,
that pattern will be treated aa a binary number
whether it was supposed to be or not. It could
be the alphabetic word GR1NCH which got there
by mistake (see "Debugging," p. JJ® ), but the
memory will treat it as an address number and go
to the address specified by that pattern.

THEN WHAT ARE THE DIFFERENCES
BETWEEN COMPUTERS?

The word length

(number of bit-spaces in a main
register and memory alot)

The number of main registers

and what they can do: i.e., how
they are set up and what operations
can take place in and among them:
l.e.,

the Instruction Set (see nearby);
The amount of memory;

The accessories or peripherals;

The cycle time.

Here’s the computer, then, in sll its glory;
s device with a symbolic program, stored in a
memory, being stepped through by s program
follower.

The commands of the program cause the
program follower to carry out the individual
steps requested by each command of the program.

THE ROCK BOTTOM PROGRAM FOLLOWER

How, you aak desperately , does thl# inner¬
most program follower work? The one that Is
built into the computer?

Aha.

Basically ft consists of two specific regis¬
ters. the Program Counter (usually abbreviated
PC) and the Instruction Register (usually abbre¬
viated IR), and other electronic stuff, loosely
termed "decoding logic."

(Since we are already visualizing the
program follower ea a little hind , let'a think of
the Index finger as the program counter and
imagine that the thumb can flip an instruction
into a little cup. the Instruction Register or IR.
What the heck.)

WHEN ■ program la set Into operation, the
binary pattern specifying ita first address in
memory is put Into the program counter.

Then the Instruction at that address la
fetched to the program follower (that ia, put in
the Instruction register), decoded and carried

THEN THE PROGRAM COUNTER AUTOMAT¬
ICALLY HAS ONE ADDED TO IT, SO IT POINTS
TO THE NEXT INSTRUCTION

The instruction pulled from memory ia
held In the command or instruction register
and there decoded by the syatem'a electronics.

it la of no concern to the programmer how
this is done electronically. (And indeed elec^
Ironies is generally of little concern to computer
people, unless they are trying to design or op¬
timize computers or other devices themselves.
Indeed, the electronic techniques are constantly
changing.)

All we need to know ia that an electrical
decoding system (called the logic circuits) carries
out the specific instruction-- for instance, by
shutting off the path to the memory, turning on
the adding circuit, and opening patha through
the adding circuit and back to the main register.

Now that the program counter holds ths
number of the next instruction it In turn Is
accordingly fetched and executed.

And so it continues.

When an instruction calls for a Jump or
branch in the program, what happens?

The Jump command causes a new number
to be stuffed into the program counter, that's
what, and so that's where the program goes next.

ALTERNATING CYCLES

Many instructions tell the program follower
to take a data word (also a binary pattern) from
memory and put it in a main register or vice

Such an Instruction is translated by the
decoding logic into a request to the memory.

Since a core memory can only do one
thing during one of ita cycles, the next instruc¬
tion in the program cannot be fetched until the
data haa moved to or from the memory.

Thus in many typea of program the cycles
alternate:

Instruction cycle (fetch ths next)

Data cycle

(data goes to or from memory).
Instruction cycle,

Data cycle,

and so on.

v To O*jF0i£.

YOUR BASIC COMMANDS. NOW

(Computsrs exist which do little more than these,
snd yet they can in principle do anything
fancier computers can do.)

TO BE SHOWN: The following are the rock-bottom
basic operations of computer!, available aa
specific Instructions in all computers (with
some variation).

The Bret seven listed below will be
used in the extended example In the next
spread.

LOAD s binary pattern from core memory to •
main register

STORE a binary pattern In core memory from a
main register.

SEND OUT ("OUTPUT") a binary pattern to an
external devloe.

BRING tN r INPUT") a binary pattern from an
external device.

ADD TWO binary patterns together. (This
causes them to be treated as numbers,
whsthar they were to begin with or not.)

JUMP—

Oo to another perl of the progrmn *
end forget you were here.

TUT TWO binary pattern! against esch other.
«id branch or not in the program depen¬
ding on the result

NOT TO BE SHOWN: Here are the rest of the

utterly fundamental commands of computsrs.
(These are not used In the forthcoming
example.)

TEST ONE SPECIFIC binary pattern, and branch
In the program depending on the result.

SET AN ACCESSORY IN OPE RATION/TURN IT OFF.

REVERSE (or "COMPLEMENT") a binary pattern -
changing all the X’e to O'e and vice versa.

SLIDE (or "SHIFT") a binary pattern sidelong
through s register.

FLIPPER (or "LOGICAL") operations between two
binary patterns, especially —

OR (or "INCLUSIVE OR" or "IOR")--
result is an X where either
original pattern was an X.

AND (or "MASK")-- result is an X
only where both origins! pat¬
tern* had an X.

FANCY OPERATIONS

Ths following operations are dssirable but not

strictly necessary. and many oomputers, es¬
pecially minicomputers, don’t have thsm all.

SUBTRACT (Can also be done If necessary
with combination of edds snd flips.)

MULTIPLY. (Can also be done if necessary

with combination of adds, shifts and teats.)

DIVIDE. (Can also be done if necessary with

combination of subtracts, shifts and (sata.)

MORE FLIPPER ("LOGICAL") operations:

XOR (or "EXCLUSIVE OR")-- result
ia an X only whare one pattern
had an X, bul not both.

NAND- ravened AND.

NOR - reversed OR

SUBROUTINE JUMP—

"Go to another part of the program
but remcmember this place beceuse you'll
be coming back on your own."

RETURN PROM SUBROUTINE--

"Go back to wherever it ws* in the
program that you last came from.”

PUSH (on Stack machines only, see p. ) —

take a binary pattern and put it on lop
of the Stack.

POP (on Stock machines only, see p. )—
take whatever binary pattern la now on
ths top of the Stack.

ADD ONE (or "INCREMENT")-- (Useful whan

you're counting the number of times some¬
thing ha* been done.)

SUBTRACT ONE (or "DECREMENT." not "excre¬
ment")-- (Also useful when you’re count¬
ing the number of times something haa beet
done.)

ASTRONOMICAL/INFINITESIMAL ARITHMETIC (or
"FLOATING POINT” arithmetic)-- opereta*
on a certain number of Significant Digits
and keep* separate track of the decimal
point-- actually a Binary Point, since it's
rarely If ever done decimally.

“►Vary important In the physical
ecicnce*.

Almost any operation* can be " built in"." The
sky Is of course the limit, since any aleo-
tronlc operation can be added to a compu¬
ter's 1 net ruction-set if daelrad sey. "turn
on the electric blender" or "multiply quat¬
ernion*"-- but ths former 1* more easily
done aa an output instruction, and tha
latter as part of a program

Somehow

LOADING. STORING,

MODIFYING
AND TESTING
BINARY PATTERNS
DOESN'T SEEM

TERRIBLY FRAUGHT
WITH POSSIBILITIES;
but the endless variation* and ramification*
make cheas look like tic-tae-toe.

And part of the power, of course, is In 1
the great speed, the teeny fraction of a second \
each step takes; five hundred operations yet
take only sbout a thousandth of a second. So
no matter how intricate the enactment to which
these tiny step# are built, it still happen*
awfully fast.

A computer, then, internally Just consist*
of certain places to work on information (main
registers), certain places to keep it the reet of
the lime (memories). certain pathways snd Inter¬
connections between there, an instruction-set
having certain power* whose lnatructions can ba
operated on out of memory, and a program fol¬
lower thel carries out tha instructions of that
Instruction -set

INSTRUCTION-BBT.

The system of command patterns

designed and wired into e particular computer,

each with its exact results

(The instruct lone in the set are the vocabulary
of a machine language .)

1 ijeGeev , _

(Ajmpuw? L<W<5W<3CJ

A certain number of computer language*
are very widely accepted and uaed; 1 list them
here. If you want to learn any of them, I believe
that Daniel McCracken has written a manual on
every one of them. (Not the variants listed,
though.)

Why their names are always spelled with
capital letters 1 don’t know. (Generally they
get let down in longer articles, though.)

MOM

TO|W\)

FORTRAN waa created In the late fifties,
largely by John BackuB, ae an algebraic pro¬
gramming system for the old IBM 704. (However,
the usual story is that it stands for FORmula
TRANslator.)

Fortran is "algebraic," that is, it uses
an algebraic sort of notation and was mostly
suited, in the beginning, to writing programs
that carried out the sorts of formulas that you
use in highschool algebra. It's strong on num¬
bers carried to a lot of decimal places ("scientific"
numbers) and the handling of arrays, which la
something else mathematicians and engineers do
a lot (see Arrays under BASIC).

Fortran has grown and grown, however;
after Fortran 1 came Fortran H. Fortran III and
Fortran IV; as well as a lot of variants like
Fortran Pi ("Irrational, and somewhere between
IU and IV"), WATFOR and WATF1V.

The larger Fortrans-- that is, language
processors that run on the bigger computers--
now have many operation a not contemplated in
the original Fortran, Including operations for
handling text and so on.

BASIC, presented earlier, is in some res¬
pects a simplified version of Fortran.

This program uas a surprise from
Alan Sslles t a student at Chicago
Cirals. Re was amused by my prac¬
tice of alphabetising phone mer-
bere, and wrote a progrm to do it
automatically.

Promisee of the program: you sup¬
ply it with your phone number, and
it prints out all the alphabetical
combinations that could also be
dialled to reach your telephone.

FotThh.

dlfO *U#MOO*»»

16*0121 9 *0122 0 - 61*1

COOf OfOillfcfWfNTl 'Oft '♦€>**

Vftlimfl 204 MOW Aft 99*

(MO O' COftMLATlnft

\IMLIPST

W n/j

ALGOL is considered by many to be
one of the best "scientific” languages; it has
been widely accepted in Europe, and is the
standard "publication language" in which procedures
for doing things are published in this country.

It Is different from FORTRAN in many ways,
but a key respect la this: while in FORTRAN
the programmer must lay out at the beginning
of hia program exactly what spaces of core
memory are to have what names, in ALGOL
the spaces in core memory are not given names
except within subsections of the program,
or "procedures." When the program follower
gets to a specific procedure, then the language
processor names the spaces in core memory.

This has several advantages. One is
that it can be uaed for so-called "recursive”
programs, or programs that call new versions
of themselves into operation. 1 guess we better
not get into that. But mathematicians like
it.

Originally this language was called 1AL,
for International Algebraic Language, but then
as it grew and got polished by various inter¬
national committees it was given its new name.

0 don't know if anyone consciously named
It after Algol, the star.)

It has gone through several versions.

Algol 62, the publication language, is one
thing; Algol 70, the 1870 version, la much
more complicated and strange.

Several versions of ALGOL have gotten
popular in this country. One. developed at
the University of Michigan, la called MAD
(Michigan Algorithm Decoder); Us symbol la
of course Alfred E. Newman . Another favorite
(for its name, anyway) la JOVIAL (Julea' Own
Version of the International Algebraic Language),
developed under Jules Schwartz (and supposedly
named without hia consultation) at System Devel¬
opment Corporation.

When IBM announced Us System 360 back
in 1864, there had been hope that they would
support the international language committees
and make Algol the baaic language of their new
computer line. No auch luck. Instead they
announced PL/1 (Programming Language I), a
computer language that waa going to be all
thing* to all men.

In programming style it resembled COBOL,
but had facilities for varieties of "scientific"
number* and aom* good data structure system*.

It 1* available for the 360 and for certain big
Honeywell computer*; Indeed, the operating sys-
tem for MULTICS (see p. fS ) waa written in
PL/1. Whether there are people who love the
language I don't know; there are certainly
people who hate It.

Below: Relies’ program to calculate the date of Easter.
The language is Algol.

Yecdtn, it's

Csrou

Research and hobby types hate COBOL or
ignore it, but it's the mein business programming
language. Your income tax, your checking ac¬
count, your automobile license— all are presum¬
ably handled by programs in the COBOL language.

COBOL, or COmmon Business Oriented Lan¬
guage, was more or leas demanded by the Depart¬
ment of Defense, and brought Into being by a
committee called CODASYL. which is apparently
still going. COBOL uses mostly decimal numbers,
la designed basically for batch processing (des¬
cribed elsewhere), and uses verbose and plonking
command formats.

Just because it's standard for business
programming doesn't mean it's the best or moat
efficient language for business programming;

I’ve talked to people who advocate business pro¬
gramming in FORTRAN, BASIC, TRAC and even
APL. But then you get into those endless argu¬
ments ... and it turns out that a large proportion
of business programmers only know Cobol, which
pragmatically settles the argument.

There are people who say they've discovered
hidden beauties in COBOL; for instance, that ft's
a splendid language for complex pointer manipulation
(see Data Structures, p. ). That's what makes
horse racing.

iA* 4 ^ as// -f J^essicsUt^

Sotkt e*il ,J

"After you etudy it for six months, it mkee
perfect sense." —An IBM enthusiast.

JCL is a language with which you submit programs
to an IBM 360 or 370 computer. "Submit" is right. Its
complications, which many call unnecessary, sysfcolis*
the career of submission to IBM upon which the 360
progra^er embarks. (Sea IBM, pp. 52-3, end 360, p. 41.)

SNOBOL is the favorite computing language
of a lot of my friends. It is a list-processing
language, meaning it's good for amorphous data.

Gt derives from several previous list-processing
languages, especially IPL-V and COMIT.^

SNOBOL Is a big language, and only runs
on big computers. The main concept of it ia
the "pattern match," whereby a string of symbols
la examined to see if It has certain characteristics,
including any particular contents, relations between
contents, or other variations the programmer can
specify; and the string substitution, where some
specified string of symbols is replaced by another
that the programmer contrives.

IiJf

ia probably the favorite language of the artificial-
intelligence freaks (see A fondness* for

LISP, incidentally, is not considered to reflect
on your masculinity.

LISP is a "cult" language, and its adherents
are sometimes called Llspiana. They see computer
activities in a somewhat different light, as com¬
posed of ever-changing chains of things called
"cars” and "cudders," which will not be explained
here.

LISP waa developed by John McCarthy at
MIT, based largely on the Lambda-notation of
Alonzo Church. It allows the chaining of oper¬
ations and data in deeply intermingled forma.

While it runs on elegant principles, moat people
object to its innumerable parentheses (a feature
shared to some extent by TRAC Language).

Joseph Weizenbaum, also of MIT, has
created a language called SLIP, somewhat resem¬
bling LISP, which runs in FORTRAN. That means
you can run LISP-like programs without hsvlng
access to a LISP processor, which is helpful.

THtN, IWi

If you feel like making program* run fast ,
and not take up very much core memory, you go
to machine language, the computer’s very
wired-up deep-down system of commands (aee
p. t3£). It takes longer, usually, but many peo¬
ple consider it very satisfying.

Then, of course. If you h*ve a particular
atyle and approach and *et of lntereata, you
will probably start building up a collection of
Individual programs for your own purposes

Then you'll work out simplified ways of
calling these Into operation end tying their
reaulta and data together.

Which mean# you'll have a language of your

own.

MGit tAMfXHGES

A computer language i» a system for casting spells.

This la not a metaphor but an exactly true statement. Each
language haa a vocabulary of commands . that is. different
orders you can give that are fundamental to the language,
f«it a syntax , that ia . rules about how to give the commands
right, and how you may fit them together and entwine them.

Learning to work with one language doesn't mean
you’ve learned another. You learn them one at a time,
but after some experience it gets easier.

There are computer languages for testing rocketshlps
and controlling oit refineries and making pictures. There
are computer languages for sociological statistics and designing
automobiles. And there are computer languages which
will do any of these things, and more, but with more difficulty
because they have no purpose built in. (But each of these
general-purpose languages tends to have its own outlook.)

Most programmers have a favorite language or two,
and this is not a rational matter. There are many different
computer languages-- m fact thousands— but what they
all have in common is acting on series of Instructions .

Beyond that, every language is different. So for each language,
the questions are

WHAT ARE THE INSTRUCTIONS?
and

HOW DO THEY FIT TOGETHER?

Most computer languages involve somehow typing
in the commands of your apell to a computer set up for that
language. (The computer is set up by putting in a bigger
program, called the processor for that language.)

L jjhnb- «■ r ic *** *****

>» </? cane muneryj

Then, after various steps, you get to try your program.

carries out each Instruction
as It's encountered.

ir A C QWiUEt#

chews the instructions
of the language
into another form
to be processed later.

lh|0*X?

Basically there are two different methods.

A compiling language , auch as FORTRAN or COBOL.
has a compiler program, which sits in the computer, and
receives the input program, or "source program." the way
the assembler does. It analyzes the eource program and
aubstitutes for it an object program, in machine language,
which ia a translation of the source program, and can actually
be run on the computer. The relation of the higher language
ia not one-to-one to machine language: many instructions
in machine language arc ofien needed to compile a single
instruction of the source program. (A source program of
100 lines can easily come out a thousand lines long in Its
output version.) Moreover, because of the interdependency
of the instructions in the source program, the compiler
usually has to check various arrangements all over the
program before it can generate the final code.

Most compilers come in several stages. You have
to put the first stage of the compiler into the computer,
then run in the source program, and the first stage puts
out a first intermediate version of the program. Then you
put this version into a second stage, which puts out a second
intermediate version; and so on through various stages.

This is done fairly automatically on big computers, but
on little machines it's a pain.

(In fact, compilers tend to be very slow programs ;
but thBt depends on the amount of "optimizing" they do.
that is. how efficient they try to make the object program.)

An interpretive language works differently, There
sits in core a processor for the language called an interpreter ;
this goes through the program one step at a time. actually
carrying out each operation in the list and going on to the
next. TRAC and APL are interpretive; it's a good way
to do quickie languages.

Interpreters are perhaps the easier method of the
two to grasp, since they seem to correspond a little better
to the way many people think of computers. That doesn't
mean they're better. For programs that have to be run
over and over, compiling is usually more economical in
the long run; but for programs that have to be repeatedly
changed , interpreters are often simpler to work with.

A BLACK ART

Making language processors, especially compilers.

Is widely regarded as a black art. Some people have tricks
that are virtual trademarks (see below) .

Once you know a language you can cast spells in
it; but that doesn't mean it's easy. A spell cast in a computer
language will make the computer do what you want—

1F it's possible to do it

with that computer;

IF it's possible to do it
in that language;

IF you used the vocabulary

and rules of the language
correctly;

and IF you laid out in the spell

a plan that would effectively
do what you had in mind.

BUT if you make a mistake in casting your spell. that is
a BUG. (As you see from the IF* aLove, many types of
bug are possible.) Program bugs can cause unfortunate
results. (Supposedly a big NASA rocket failed in takeoff
once because of a misplaced dollar sign in a program.)

Getting the bugs out of a program is czlled debugging.

It's very hard.

4k rifar

h st\s (A

Actually, the design of a language-- especially the
syntax . how its commands fit together-- strongly influences
the design of its processor. BASIC and APL. for instance,
work left-to-right on each line, and top-to-bottom on a
program. Both act on something stored in a work area.

TRAC, on the other hand, works left-to-right on a text
string that changes size like a rubber band. Other languages
exhibit comparable differences.

MIXED CASES AND VARIATIONS (for the whimsical)

There are a lot of mixed cases. A load-and-go compiler
(such as WATFOR) is put into the computer with the program,
compiles it. and then starts it going immediately. An interpretive
compiler looks up what to do with a given instruction by in¬
terpreting it into a series of steps, but compiling them instead
of carrying them out. (A firm called Digitek is well known
for making very good compilers of this type.) An Incremental
compiler just runs along compiling a command at a time;
this can be a lot faster but has drawbacks.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

DESIGNING COMPUTER LANGUAGES

Every programmer who's designed a language, and
created a processor for it. had certain typical uses in mind.
If you want to create your own language, you figure out
what sorta of operations you would like to have be basic
in it, and how you would like it all to fit together so as
to allow the variations you have in mind. Then you program
your processor (which is usually very hard).

David Gries, Compiler Con struct ion for Digital Computers .

Not for beginners, but a beautiful book. Good on
abstract theory of languages, too.

A program ia like a nose;

Sometimes It runs, sometimes it blows.

Attributed to Howard Roae.
( Datamation . 1 Sep 71. 33.)

According to the grapevine.. .

a prestigious Southern university
had a program
where the number of months
was carelessly set to 10
(aa a dimension In an array).

In November,

nobody got their checks
till this error was found.

candid photos

J£50<26fk|<r

Debugging means changing and fixing your program till it works the way you
want it to.

This ie the part of programing people like the leaet.

You run your program and then try to find out what vent wrong. It could be
a mietake in the baeio thinking ("logic error"), or a clerical error in the
particular choice of ao/mands to carry out a well-thought »ou t prooeee
("ooding error”).

Some eyeteme allow you to debug interactively, from a terminal. This helps
a lot. You can run parts of your progran, get it to stop at certain points
to let you look around, and so on.

No program is ever fully debugged.

For every bug that goes out.
two more bugs go tn.

-- folk saying

- - folk saying

Tilt OFMT^

How does a computer program
print something out on a printing
machine? It sends the code for each
letter out to the printing machine.

How does a computer program
respond to something a user types in?
It compares the codes that come in
from the letters he types with a
series of codes in memory, and when
it finds a match between letters,
numbers, words or phrases, bran¬
ches to the corresponding action.

How doea a computer program
measure something? It takes in
numerical codes from a device which
has already made the measurements
and converted them to codes.

IF Vt)0 WAMT

WE GOT 'e^

The baalc klnda of number operations
wired into all computers are few: Just add
(and sometimes subtract) binary numbers.
However, up above the minicomputer range,
a computer may have multiply, divide, and
more. Fancier computers ofTer more types
and operations on them.

PLAIN BINARY— Very important for coun¬
ting. Represents numbers aa
patterns of l's and O'a (or X's
and Ohs, if you prefer). How
to handle negative numbers?
Two ways:

TRUE NEGATIVE-- binary number
with a sign bit at the begin-
k ning, followed by the number.

Some TV writer’s
idea of a computer
announces this when
data are insufficient or
contradictory. Ho hum.

Od$|€J>--|>OWM fATh,'-

AN i!*A wHVe TtMe
HAS fAKC>

Codes are patterns or symbols which
are assigned meanings. Sometimes we
make up special codes to cut down the a-
mount of information that has to be stored.

On your driver’s license, for instance,
they may reduce your hair color to one
decimal digi, (four bits of information),
since there are less than nine possibilities
for quick identification of hair-color anyway.

Obviouily. codes can be any dam
thing: any set of symbols that is less than
what you started with. But by compressing
information they lose information, so that
subtleties disappear (consider the use of
Letters A to F to grade students). When
you divide a continuum into categories, not
just the fewness of the categories, but the
places you draw the line— called ’’breaks"
or "cutting-points’'— present problems. Such
chopping frequently blurs out important dis¬
tinctions. Coding is always arbitrary, fre¬
quently destructive and stupid.

Lota of ways now exist to handle writ¬
ten information by computer. These often
present better ways to operate than by using
codes of this type. But many computer pro¬
grammers prefer to make you use codes.

(NOTE: there are two other senses of
"code" used hereabouts: 1) the binary pat¬
terns made to stand for any information.
especially on input and output; 2) what
computer programs consist of, that is, lines
of commands.)

<yoMt PoiK\JS

, Trouble is, the arithmetic is

£ harder to wire for this kind,

‘ because there are two zeroes

(plus and minus) between 1
and -i.

ADDABLE NEGATIVE— this system
does a sort of flip and begins
a negative number with all
ones. It means that the ma¬
chine doesn't have to have sub¬
traction circuitry: you Just add
the flipped negative version of
a number, and that actually
subtracts it. This has now
caught on generally. (It’s
usually called "twos complement
negative," which has some ob¬
scure mathematical meaning.)

BCD (Binary-Coded Decimal)— the accoun¬
tant's numbering system. Used by
COBOL (see p. Z/\ ). It’s plain old
decimal, with every numeral stored
In four bits: the machine or language
has to add them one numeral at a
time, instead of crunching together
full binary words.

FLOATING POINT-- the scientist’s number
technique for anything that may not
come out even. Expresses any
quantity as an amount and a size.

, >'it . aw 4

4«iVk*J pf'-'t) ^

The "amount" part contains the ac¬
tual binary numerals, the "size" is
the number of places in front of or
after the decimal point that the num¬
ber starts. Very important for as¬
tronomical and infinitesimal matters,
since a floating-point number can be
bigger, say, than

For some people even this isn’t pre¬
cise enough, so they program up
"Infinite precision arithmetic,” which
carries out arithmetic to as many
places as they want. It takes much
longer, though.

For historical reasons computers have
been used mostly with numbers up to now
but that is going to be thoroughly turned ’
•round. Within a few years there ^ b,
more text- written prose and poetry--
stored on computers than numbers.

Control, reC * nt mM8iv * la*»auit by

k V* na ‘ [BM ' U was sealed
that IBM had an awesome number of letters
and communications stored on magnetic
memory. J

When I Lived in New York, I had a
driver’s license with the staggering serial
number

NO 5443 12903 3-4121-37

Now it may very well be, as in some
serial numbers, that information Is hidden
in the number that Insiders can dope out,
like my criminal record or automobile acci¬
dents , if any. (N is my initial, and two
of the digits show my date of birth, a handy
check against alteration by thirsty minors.

But the rest of it is ridiculous.) The fact
that that leaves 15 more decimal digits means
(if no other codes are hidden) that New York
State has provision in their license numbering
for up to 999,999,999.999.999 inhabitants.

It is doubtful that there will ever be that
many New Yorkers, or indeed that many
human beings while the species endures.

In other words, either New York
State is planning on having many, many
more occupants, or an awfully inefficient
code has been adopted, meaning a lot of
memory space is wasted holding those
silly big numbers for milliona of drivers.
However, that doesn't represent s lot of
money. 10 million decimal spaces these

days fits on a couple of disk drives. But
it’s an awful pain in the neck when you
want to cash a check.

m WTfUT

Data has to get inside the machine
somehow, and results have to get back out.
Two main types of codes— that is, stan¬
dardized patterns— exist, although what
forma of data programs work mi inside
varies considerably. (The input data can
be completely transformed before internal
work starts.)

1. ASCII (pronounced "Askey."
American Standard Code for Information
Exchange. This allows all the kinds of
numbers and alphabets you could possibly
want (for instance, Swahili) for getting
information in and out of computers.

ASCII is used to and from moat
Teletype terminals and key scopes.

"Logical deduction" really consists of tech¬
niques for finding out what’s already
in a data structure.

"Logical inconsistency" means a data

structure contradicts itself. Rarely
does it happen that a computer helps
you discover something new about a
subject that you didn’t suspect or see
coming without the computer; after
all. you have to set up a study in
such a way aa to make room to find
things out, and you can only make
room to find some things out.

Til* PUNCH Cftft) HOjTH'T'f

Punch cards are not Intrinsically evil.

They have served many useful purposes.

But the punch-card mentality is still around.

This will be seen in the programmer who
habitually sets things up so we have to use
punch cards (when other media, or inter¬
active terminals, would be better); who in¬
sists an the user or victim putting down
numbers (when with ■ little more effort the
program could handle text, which is easier
for the human , or even look up the infor¬
mation in data it has already); who Insists
that people's last names be cut down to
eleven letters because he doesn't feel like
leaving a longer field or handling exceptions
in his program; who insists on the outsider
cutting his information into snarfy little codes,
when euch digestion, if needed at all, could
be batter done by the program; and so on.

The punch card mentality is responsible
the woes that have been blamed

WHAT’S AVAILABLE IN
MACHINES AND LANGUAGES

Some machines, like the 360, are
more-or-less wired up to handle several
number types: binary, floating point, BCD.
Little machines usually only have plain bin¬
ary. so other types have to be handled by
programs built up from that fundamental
binary.

Languages make up for this by
providing programs to handle numbers in
some or all of these formats. There ere
languages that offer even more kinds of
numbers--

IMAGINARY numbers

(two-pert numbers
following certain rules)

QUATERNIONS

(like Imaginary numbers
but worse)

and goodness knows what else.

On the other hand, some languages
restrict what number facilities are avail¬
able for simplicity's sake. BASIC, for
instance, doesn't distinguish between
integers (counting numbers) and those
with decimal points; all numbers may have
decimal points. TRAC Language only
gives you integers to start, since it's easy
enough to program other klnda of number
behavior in dike Infinite precision).

However, ASCII is also used for
internal storage of alphabetical data in
many non-IBM systems, andit is also the
running form of a number of programming
languages, such as TRAC language (see
p. \3), TECO ^aeS-p. :_T. and GRASS
(aee P-^.)-

IBM’s deliberate undermining of the
ASCII code is a source of widespread anger.
(See IBM. p. 52,.)

2. EBCDIC (pronounced "Ebaadick.")
Extended Binary Coded Decimal. This was
the code IBM brought out with the 360.
passing ASCII by. (IBM seems to think of
compatibility as a privilege that must be
earned, i.e., paid for.) EBCDIC also al¬
lows numbers, the English alphabet, and
various punctuation marks. This Is used
to and from most IBM terminals ("2741
type"),

H ki f °-

HOLLERITH, meaning the column
patterns that go in on punched cards.

(They can eleo come out that way. if you
want them to.)

CARD-IMAGE BINARY, if for some
reason you want exact binary patterns
from your program, they can be punched
out as rows or columns on punch cards.

STERLING Just to show you how
comical things can get. the original PL/I
specifications (see p.3j ) allowed n urn be re
to be input end output in terms of Pounds.
Shillings and Pence (12 pence to the shil¬
ling. 20 shillings to the pound). No pro¬
vision was made for Guineas (the 21-ahU-
Ung unit) . or farthings, unfortunately.

MAGNETIC STORAGE

Oat* la punched Into cards according to
some plan associated with the program.

Beyond Those simple matters there la no
preordained arrangement for information on a
punch card; It all depends on what the program
calls for. But each separate piece or section
of information-- each bunch of consecutive
characters that together have a specific meaning
— are called a field .

A field can be a name, a number, an
amount of money, an alphabetical code repre¬
senting something, a numerical code represent¬
ing something, or other stuff. When the cards
go into the program, the program can pick ofT
the information it needs one field at a time--
putting the field in columns 1 to 17 into one
program variable, the field from columns nine
to ten Into another program variable, and ao

irmstjsvim

Some Tines n cioMes $*l$Goer.

Data usually has to be marshalled into
rows . or even regiments and battalions, before
it can go into a computer.

(Some people just get their data into a
computer by sitting at a terminal and typing
it in. perhaps answering questions typed to them
by a front-end program. But they’re the lucky
ones. Most of us have to get the data set up
on some kind of holding surface before it gets
fed in. That's an input medium . )

DATA MEDIA

A data medium ("medium" is the singular
of "media") is anything that holds the marks of
data outside the core memory of a computer.

Thus punched cards and punched paper tape
may be used as input media , used for putting
information into a computer. (Each medium
needs a corresponding input or output device ,
to whisk across the surface and translate Its
marks or holes into the corresponding electronic
pulses.)

There are three types of data media:
input , output and storage media. An input
medium carries the data in. An output medium
receives the results of a program; for instance,
a sheet of paper coming out of a printing device
is an output medium, as is a punched card or
punched paper tape.

Storage media are output media that may
be used as input media later on. Thus punched
cards and punched paper tape can be storage
media. But the better storage media use mag¬
netic recording (which ia faster and less bulky),
like magnetic tape and disks, or just plain
"diaka" as we generally call them. (See fuller
list of mag media under "Peripherals," p. 5^ ■>

The units and arrangements of data used
for input , output and storage are in principle
not necessarily the true ones of the data structure
used by the program . The blocks and records
of storage, for instance, may have irregular
data with pointers sitting in them. (Unfortun¬
ately there is some carryover, in that program¬
mers are tempted to use data structures which
are easy to store and run in and out, rather
than handling the true complexities of the sub¬
ject. This is always a temptation.)

Let us consider the units and arrangements
of data used for input and output and storage.
Theae are, respectively, fields, records, files
and blocks.

THE PUNCH CARD

Let's begin with s fun example: that
hoary old medium for input and output, the
punched (or "punch") card . The punch card
will ehow ua what a field is.

The punch card Is generally believed to
have been invented by Herman Hollerith (al¬
though the author's ln-lawa had bitter recollec¬
tions lo the contrary). It was first used on a
broad scale to count up the census of 1890, and
later became an early cornerstone of IBM, but
that's another story.

The punohea on a card represent a row
of information (such as a row of typed letters).
this is not obvious because the card is a rec¬
tangle rather than • fine. However, the length
of the card ia actually divided into eighty poai
tiona, each of which may hold one number,
alphabetic character or punctuation mark.

These positions are actually narrow columns,
eighty of them, with different positions In which
holes may be punched. One hole in a column
represents a numeral; which position in the
column specific■ what number. Two holes In
a column generally mean a letter of the alphabet,
three holes In a column mean a punctuation

—-

it f ult- ie <te*
*.#k

- Aawv,

tor+£r <s

»•* 7 e, * A

The punch card is an important example
of an input unit influencing the structure of
computer programs. It la convenient to use
fields on a punch card as the basic data struc¬
ture of a program and say, "That's the way it
has to be for the computer. In the worst cases
we see the workings of the "punch card men¬
tality" or "BO-column mind" (see box).

—r People will often thrust a punched data
card at you and ask, "What does this mean?"

Who knows? it may have lettering banged along
the top, showing what characters the holes rep¬
resent, but if these characters don’t Bhqw any¬
thing understandable, such as the person's name,
you're in the dark. The card may have pre¬
printed section lines dividing it up, but these
are rarely self-explanatory. It's often im¬
possible just to look at a punched card and
tell by eye what the individual fields are for,
or even where they begin and end; all that
depends on the program. Only someone who
understands the program, or at least knows
what fields the card is divided into and what
the characters represent there, can help.

Sometimes, in dismal systems we encoun¬
ter day-to-day-- like for university registration
— a punch card will have a person's name in
the first few columns, or worse, a personal
serial number . Other information continues
from there. These may or may not be recog¬
nizable. either from reading the holes by eye,
or from designations pre-printed on the card.

ASCII code. You can figure out from
the table the bit pattern for any letter, or
what any given combination of seven bits
means.

Example . Find the capital letter G
in the table. For the first three bits of the
code, look at the top of the column: 100.
For the next four, look sideways to the
left; 0111. So G is: 1000111.

(An eighth bit la used as a check on
the number of one* in the code; this la
called the parity bit. and either rounds to
an even number of bits (even parity) or an
odd number of blta (odd parity). Thus if
a code cornea through to the computer with
a wrong number of ones, the computer
can take remedial action.)

Those funny multlletter codes are for
controlling terminals and like that.

Pocket card courtesy of Computer
Transceiver Systems. Inc.

The aame principle of fields applies l n
other data media, especially magnetic tape and
disk. We may extend the notion of a field to
explain records and files.

A field , generally speaking, is a section
of positions on some medium reserved for one
particular piece of Information, or the data In it.

A record is a bunch of fields stored on
some medium which have some organized use,
(For instance, the accounting information held
by an electric utility company about a particular
customer is likely to be stored as a record with
at least these fields: account number, last name;
Initials; address; amount currently owed.)

A file is a whole big complete bunch of
information that is stored someplace. In many
applications a file Is composed of numerous
similar, consecutive records. For instance,
an electric company may well store the records
for all of its customers on a magnetic tape,
ordered by account number (account 000001
first).

Storing sequences of similar records in
long files is typical of business programs,
though perhaps this should begin to change.

It's especially suited to batch processing,

thst is. handling many records in the same

way at the same time. (See "System Programs.")

Now, the divisions of field, record and
file are conceptual: they are what the program¬
mer thinks about, based on the information
needs of a specific computer program.

BLOCKS

A block is something else, which may be
related only to quirks of the situation.

A block is s section of stored material,
divided either according to the divisions of the
data or peculiarities of the device holding it,
such as a disk drive. Short records may be
stored many to a block. If records are long
they may be made up of many blocks.

-♦In particular, tape blocks can be almost
any size, while disk blocks often have a certain
fixed size (number of characters or bits) based
on the peculiarities of the individual device.
(This can be a pain in the neck.)

On the other hand, due to. the quirks of
magnetic recording, your program usually can't
just change something in the middle of a block;
the whole disk block or tape file has to be re¬
placed. This is less trouble with a short disk
block than a long tape file.

If ‘t tr*rfo

it ©*■ice.

TRADITIONAL CONVEYEH-BELT PROGRAMS

Many traditional business programs are of
this type, reading In one data record at a time,
doing something to it (such as noting that an
Individual has paid the exact amount of his gaa)
and writing out a new record for that customer
on the current month's tape.

THE PROBLEM

Standardized fields, blocks and records
are often neceaaary or convenient. But, on the
other hand, the kinds of computer progreme
people find oppressive often have their roots in
this kind of data storage and Its associated styles
of programming, especially the use of fixed-field
record# as the be-ail and end-all. The more
Interesting use# of the computer (Interactive,
obliging, artistic, etc.) use a greater variety
of data structures.

---V'A

People's naive idee of "programming" ia often e reasonable
approximation to tha notion of "data structure." Data atructure
is how information ia aet u£ After It’s eet up. progreme
can twiddle it; but the twiddling options are based on how
the information is set up to begin with.

A CONCRETE EXAMPLE Suppose we went
to represent the genealogy of the monarchs of Eng-
England. so fer as ie known, in a computer data
Structure. NOTE THAT A DATA STRUCTURE IS
DIFFERENT FROM A PROGRAM: If several program¬
mers agree beforehand on a data structure, then
they can go separate ways and each can write a
program to do something different with it-- if they
have really agreed on a complete and exact layout.
which they may only think they’ve done.

First we consider the subject matter . Gen¬
ealogy is conceptually simple to us, but as data
is not as trivial as it might seem at first. Every
person has two parents and a specific date of birth.
Each pair of parents can have more than one child,
and individual parents can st different times share
parenthood with different other individuals.

Presumably we would Uke a data structure
that allows a program to find out who was a given
person's parent, who were a given person’s chil¬
dren, what brothers and slaters each person had.
and similar matters (so far aa is known by histor¬
ians-- another difficulty).

Note that just because it is simple to put this
Information in a wall chart, that does not mean it
it simple to figure out an adequate data structure.

Note too, that any aspect of data which
is left oifi cannot then be handled by (he program .
What’a not there is not there.

The easy way out is to use a language like,
say, TRAC Language, and uae Its basic units (in
this case, "forms") to make up a data structure
whose individual sections would show parentage,
dates, brothers and sisters and so on.

The braver approach is to try to set it up
for something like FORTRAN or BASIC, languages
which treat core memory more like a numerically-
addressed array or block, as does rock-bottom
machine language.

Let us assume that we have decided to use
an array-type data structure, for instance to go
with a program in the BASIC language on a 16-
bit minicomputer. We do not have much room
in core memory, so for each person in our data
structure we are going to have to store a sepa¬
rate record on s disk memory, and call it into
core memory as required.

After much head-scratching, we might
come up with something like the fallowing. It
is not a very good data structure. It is not a
very good date structure on purpose.

It useB a block of 26 words, or 448 bits,
per individual, not counting the length of his
name, which is an additional 8 bits per char¬
acter or space. However, this in itself Ib nei¬
ther good nor bad. It's more than you might
expect, but leas than you might need.

fincidentally, out of concern for storage
space, some date fields are packed more than
one to a 16-bit computer word. This is scorn¬
fully called bit-fiddling by computerfolk who
work on big machines and don't have to worry
about such matters.)

I monarch no. (if any) ,'aex-r

-Cl bit)

Individual’s own

2 1

1 aerial no~ ~ 1

(name)

3. !

* {

(two 16-bit words long)

mother

serial no.

father

6 <

aerial no.

brothers

7 !

aerial no.

(up to five)

9 !

10 1

11 !

sisters

aerial no.

(up to five)

data of 1st reign, if any

_ tt«t.(ll bits) Tno. months

data of 2d reign, if any

18 :

start (11 bits) ! no. months

female children,

18 |

1 aerial no.

up to five

■

21 1

22 i

male children.

aerial no.

up to five

Here are some assumptions I have embodied
in this data structure. That Is, I had them in
mind. (The parts you didn’t hsvs in mind srs
what get you later.)

Parents and children of monarehe
are included, as well as
monarchs.

All monarchs have s separate mon¬
arch number.

No monarch reigned more than
twice. (?)

No monarch or parent of a monarch
had more than five children
of one sex. (Note the danger
of these assumptions.)

We are not interested in grandchil¬
dren of monarchs unless they
are also monarchs, or siblings,
or parents of monarcha.

The information about the different
people can be input in any
order, as the years of reign
can be stepped through by a
program to find the order of
reign.

If this seems like too much bother, that is
in a way the point. Data atructurca must be
thought out . Since computers have no intrinsic
way of operating or or handling data (though
particular languages will restrict you in partic¬
ular ways), you will have to work all thie out,
and a carelessly chosen data structure will leave
something out, or fail to distinguish among im¬
portant differences, or otherwise have its revenge.

(For instance, if you haven’t noticed yet:
we left out legitimacy . For many purposes we
want to know which kings were bastards.)

(Self-test: is five bits long enough to ex¬
press the greatest number of months any English
monarch reigned? -- see "Binary Patterns." Or
do we have to fix this data structure on that
score also?)

To give you a sense of the sort of program
this data structure allows:

A program to ascertain how many kings
were the sons of kings would look at each entry
that had a monarch number, test whether the
monarch was male, and if male, would look at
the male parent's serial number. Then it would
look up that parent's entry, and see whether it
in turn had a monarch number, and if so, add
one to the count it was making. Then it would
go back to the entry it had been looking at.
and step on to the one after that.

This is actually a pretty lousy data struc¬
ture. The clumsiness of this approach to such
data-- and you ore welcome to think of a better
one-- shows some of the difficulties of handling
complex data about the real world. Things like
lengths of names and numbers of relatives pro¬
duce great irregularitiea, but make these kinds
of data no less worth of our attention.

We could odd lots of things to our data
structure (and so make it more unwieldy). For
instance, we might want to mark each aerial
number specially if it referred to someone who
was the offspring of a monarch. We could sim¬
ply set a particular bit to 1 in the serial number
for them (called a flag or tag ). We could also flag
dates and genealogies that are regarded as un¬
certain. There is no limit to (he exactness and
complexity with which information may be rep ¬
resented . But doing it right can, as always,
be troublesome.

A lot of computer people want to avoid
dealing with complex data; perhaps you can be¬
gin to see why. But we must deal with the
true complexities of information; therefore lan¬
guages and systems that allow complex informa¬
tion structures must become better-known and
easier to use.

THE FRONTIER: COMPLEX FILE STRUCTURE

The arrangements of whole files-- groups
of records or other info chunks-- are up to the
programmer. The structure of files is celled,
not surprisingly. file structure , and it is up to
the programmer to decide how hla files should
be arranged.

Aa explained already, that was the basic
block. We still have to keep the names aome-
whare, in a string area. Whether to keep this
In core all the time, or on disk. ia a decision
we needn’t go into hare.

Habits die hard. The notion of sequence--
even false, imposed sequence-- is deep in the
racial unconscious of computer people. An inter¬
esting concrete term shows this nicely. Because
computer people often think any file should hove
a basic sequence, they use the term inverted
file for a file that hsa been changed from its
basic sequence to another sequence. But increas¬
ingly, all the sequences are false and artificial.
Where now are inverted files? All files are in¬
verted if they’re anything.

Fortunately, the final frontier of data
structure is now increasingly recognised as the
control of complex storage of files on disk mem¬
ory. The latest fancy term for this is data base
system , meaning planned-out overall storage that
you can send your programs to like messengers.

The fact that IBM now has moved into this
area (with its intricate "access methods" and all
their Initials) means complex storage control has
filially arrived, although the pioneering work
was done by Bachman at GE some years ago
(see bibliography). Till the last few years,
external storage, with pointers and everything,
haa not been conveniently under the programmer’s
control except in crude weys. Finally we are
seeing ay sterna beginning to get around that
automatically handle complex file structures in
versatile ways that programmers can use more
aaally.

<^ 1 *

-UtK

1U LH

_. . , , - -ccepi a radically new

point of view, one that would liberate the opplic.tion
programmer’s thinking from the centralism of core
storage and allow him the freedom to act aa a nevlg,-

cause " “ d h B(8baS€ ■ This reorientation will
cause as much anguish among programmers aa the

■ B “ ry “ “"‘' m »«

Charles W. Bachman
(piece cited in Bibliography)

Remember the song that had
a pointer data structure?

(in alphabetical order)

ANKLE BONE
BACK BONE
FOOT BONE
► HEAD BONE
HIP BONE
KNEE BONE
NECK BONE
SHIN BONE
SHOULDER B(
THIGH BONE

Malcolm C. Harrison. Date-Structures and

Programming . Scott. Foresman. 1973.

-►This book CBn be recommended to
ambitious beginners. It has useful sum¬
maries of different languages, as well as
fundamental treatment of data structures
as they intertwine with specific languages.

An obscure and intricate 9tudy of the inter¬
changeability of data structures- 1 - how they
fundamentally interconvert-- has been the
longtime research of one Anatol Holt, who
calls hia work Mem-Theory . Mem is from
memory . and also, conveniently, a Hebraw
letter.

This is an extremely ambitious study,
as it in principle embraces not just much
or all of computer science, but perhaps
mathematics itself. Math freaks attention :
Holt has said he intended to derive all of
symbolic logic and mathematics from
relations and pointer structures . Let’s
hear it for turning Russell on hla head.

I don’t know if Holt has published
anything on it In the open literature or not.

However, he does have a game
available which seems weirdly to embody
these principles. The gamo of Mom is
available for $6.50 postpaid ($6.86 to
Pennsylvanians) from Stelledar. Inc.,

1700 Walnut St., Phila. PA 19103. It haa
beautifully colored pieces, looks deceptive¬
ly simple, and is unlike anything , except
discrete abstractive thinking itself. Recom¬
mended .

Charles W. Bachman. "The Programmer as Navi¬
gator." CACM Nov 1973.

Bachman was the prime mover in the
development of large linked disk data sys¬
tems at General Electric; he ia the Pioneer.
Thta ia about big n-dimensional stuff.

David Lefkovitz, File Structures lor On-Line
Systems . Spartan-Hayden Books, $12.

Alfonso F. Cardenas, "Evaluation of File Organ¬
ization-- a Model and System " CACM
Sep 73. 540-548. Not surprisingly. R
turns out that different file organizations
have different advantages.

Edgar H Sibley and Robert W. Taylor. "A Data
Definition and Mapping Language." CACM
Dec 73. 750-759.

Example of current sophisticated
approachea: a whole language for nailing
the data Just the way it should be. Haa
helpful further citations

j)ATA -STfOC.TOK.e-.

INFORMAL SttVirj

On# of the commonest and most destructive
myths about computers is the ides that they "only
deal with number*." This is TOTALLY FALSE.

Not only is it a ghastly misunderstanding, but it is
often an intentional misrepresentation, and as such,
not only is it a misrepresentation but it is a damned
lie. and anyone who telle It is using "mathematics"
as a wet noodle to beat the reader with.

Computers deal with symbols and patterns.

Computers deal with symbols of any kind --
letters, musical notes. Chinese ideograms, arrows,
ice cream flavors, and of course numbers. (Num¬
ber* come also in various flavors, simple and
baroque. See chocolate box^ p. .

Data structure means any symbols and pat¬
terns set up for use in a computer. It means what
things are being taken into account by a computer
program, and how these things are set up-- what
symbol* and arrangements are used to represent
them.

The problem, obviously, is Representing
The Information You Want Just The Way You Want It,
in all its true complexities.

(Thia is often forbiddingly stated as "making
a mathematical model"-- but that's usually in the
rhetorical, far-fetched and astral sense in which
all relations are "mathematical'' and letters of the
alphabet are considered to be a special distorted
kind of number.)

Now it happens that there are many kinds of
data structure, and they are interchangeable in
intricate ways.

The same data, with all Its relationships and
intricacies, can be set up in a vast variety of ar¬
rangements and styles which are inside-out and
upside-down versions of each other. The same
thing (say. the serial number, 24965, of an auto¬
mobile) may be represented in one data structure
by a set of symbols (such as the decimal digits
2, 4, 9. 6 , 5 in that order), and in another data
structure by the position of something else (such
as the 24965th name in a list of automobile owners
registered with the manufacturer).

Furthermore, many different forms of data
may be combined or twisted together in the same
overall setup.

The data structure chosen goes a long way
in imposing techniques and styles of operation on
the program.

On the other hand, the computer language
you use has a considerable effect upon the data
structures you may choose. Languages tend to
impose styles of handling information . The deci-
aion to program a given problem in a specific lan¬
guage, such as BASIC or COBOL or APL or TRAC
Language, either Jocks you into specific types of
data structure, or exerts considerable pressure to
do it a certain way. In most cases you can't set it
up just any way you want, but have lo adjust to
the language you are using - slthough today's
languages tend to allow more and more tvDes of
data.

An array (also called a table ) is a section
of core memory which the programmer cordons off
for the program to put and manipulate data in. if
SPENCER is the name of the array , then SPENCER (1)
is the first memory slot in it, SPENCER(2) is the
second, and ao on up to however big it le.

(You can get a feel for how this ordin¬
arily relates to input from outside-- see "How
Data Comes, Coes . and Sits nearby . )

The contents of a numerical field, or
piece of data coming in, can simply be stuffed
by the programmer Into a variable.

The contents of a record , or unified
set of fields, can get put into an array. The
program can then pick into it for separate
variables, if desired, or just leave them
there to be worked on .

Then you twiddle your variables with
your program as desired.

When you've done one record, you
repeat. That's how lots of business programs
go. Some other routine kinds, too.

FANCY STRUCTURES

Many forms of advanced programming are
based on the idea that things don't have to be stored
next to each other, or in any particular order.

If things aren't next to each other, we need
another way the program can tell how they belong
together.

A pointer , then-- sometimes called a link- -
is a piece of data that tells where another piece of
data is, in some form of memory. Pointers often
connect pieces of data.

A pointer can be an address in core memory: it
can be an address on disk ( diskpointer ); it can
point to a whole string of data, such as a name,
when there is no way of knowing in advance how
long the siring may be ( stringpointer ).

A series of pieces of data which point to each
other in a continuing sequence is called a threaded
list .

For this reason the handling of data held together
by pointers-- even though it may make all sorts of
different patterns-- is called list processing . (The
(The term "Jisl processing" might seem to go a-
gainst common sense, as it might suggest something
like, say, a laundry list, which is structured in a
very simple blocklike form. But that's what we
call it.)

Prominent list-processing languages include
SNOBOL, L 6 and LISP (see p.^l )■ There is argu¬
ment as to whether TRAC Language is a list-proc¬
essing language.

PAST-CHANGING DATA

One of the uses of such structures is in
strange types of programs where the interconnec¬
tions of information are changing quickly and
unpredictably 3uch operations happen fast In
core memory. In this kind of programming (for
which languages like LISP, SNOBOL and TRAC
Language are especially convenient), the pointers
are changed back and forth in core memory, every
which way, ell the time. Presumably according to
the programmer's fiendish master plan-- if he'a
gotten the bugs out. (See Debugging, p .30 .)

FANCY FILES

But these structures are not restricted to
data in core memory . Complex and changeable
files can be kept on disk In various ways by the
same kind of threading (called "chaining" on mass
storage).

CHAINED FILE ON DISK

Another way of handling changeable files is
through a so-called direclory block, which keeps
track of where all the other blocks are stored.

[ \ i|oclr

Si *Y

d n

But these techniques, you see, may be used
in both fast and slow operations, and for any pur¬
pose. so trying to categorize them tends not to be
helpful. (Note also that these techniques work
whether you're dealing with bits , or characters ,
or any other form of data.)

Note: By decent standards of English,
the word data should be plural, datum sin¬
gular. But the matter is too far gone: data
is now utterly singular, like "corn" and
"information," a granular collective which
may be scooped. poured or counted.

But I draw the line at media , Media
are many, "media" ia plural!

Here are some interesting structures that
programmers create by list processing:

RINGS (or cycles ). These are arrangements
of pointers that go around in a circle to their first
item again.

TREES. These are structures that fan out.
(There are no rings in a tree structure, technically
speaking.)

h CLASId KWMKWTAW6-

"Computers put everything into pigeonholes."

Wrong. People pul things into pigeon¬
holes. And designers of computer programs
cun set up lousy pigeonholes, if you let 'em.
More sophisticated programming cun often
avoid pigeonholes entirely.

Plainly, then. It is these overall structures
that we really care about; but to understand over¬
all structures, we need an idea of all the different
form* of data that may be put in them .

VARIABLES AND ARRAYS

The earliest data structures in computers,
and still the predominating ones, are variables and
arrays. (We met them earlier under BASIC, see
fP and APL , see jj. ££. 5 :)

A variable ia a spaca or location in core
memory. (For convenience, most programming
language* allow the programmer to call a variable
by a name, ao that he doesn't hsve lo keep (rack
of ita numerical addreaa.)

/^Y

O □ a □ a cl a a

GRAPH STRUCTURES (sometimes called
piexea ). Here the word "graph" is not used In the
ordinary way. to mean a diagrammatic sort of pic¬
ture, but to mean any structure of connected
points. Rings and trees are special casea of graph
atructure*.

ASif

People who went to feel With It
occasionally use the term "bit" for
any old chunk of information. like a
name or address. This is Wrong.

A Bit is the smalleat piece of binary
information, an itam thal can be one
of two things, like heads or tails,

X or 0. one or zero; end all olhar
information can ba packed Into a
countable number of bite. (How many
may depend on the data structure
chosen,)

As a handy rule of thumb:
every latter of the alphabet or punc¬
tuation mark ia eight bits (see ASCII
box); for heavy storage of evaryday
decimal numbers. every numerical
digit can be further packed down (lo
four bit* in BCD code)

WHERE TO GET IT

ROUND (an obacure and donnish Joke)

p. (he Greek letter "rho," Is an APL operator
/ for testing the size of arrays, When used
In the one-sided format, It gives the sites
of each dimension of an array.

Thu * R si

ftk . when A ts L *

Is 2 2. L J

And now

/j'YOUR BOAT'

/ equals 9, since there are 9 letters
In the array 'YOUR BOAT';
j'YOUR BOAT’

since ft 9 is 1, and
cyy> 'YOUR BOAT'
is likewise 1.

This language la superb for "8010011110” programming,
including heavy number crunching and etper
indentation with different formulas on small
data bases. (Big data bases are a problem.)

It is also not bad for a variety of simple business
applications, such as payroll, accounting,
billing and inventory.

FAST ANSWERBACK rN APL

If you want quick answers, the APL terminal
just gives you the result of whatever you type in.
For instance,

3 * 4

will cause it to print out
12

and the same goes for far less comprehensible
stuff like

7 £ ^ <j> 71234 (carriage return)

typed-in array

PROGRAMS IN APL

But the larger function of APL is to create
programs that can be stored, named and carried
out at a later time.

For this, APL allows you to define programs,
a line at a time. The programs remain stored in the
system as long as you want. Using the "Del"
operator (V), you tell the system that you want to
put in a program. Del causes the terminal to help
you along in various ways.

A nice feature is that you can lock your APL
programs, that is, make them inaccessible and
unreadable by others, whether they are
programmers or not. in this case you define a
program starting with the mystical sign del-tilde
(instead of del ( V) ■ and Invoke the names
of dark spirlta.

APL, like BASIC, can be classed aa an "algebraic"
language— but this one la built to please
real mathematicians. with high-level stuff
only they know about, like Inner and Outer
Products.

Paradoxically, thia makes APL terrific for teaching
these deeper mathematical concepts, helping
you see the consequences of operations and
the underlying structure of mathematical
things. Matrix aljebra, for Instance, can be
visualized a lot better by working up to it
with lesser concepts (ilke vectors and
inner products) enacted on an APL terminal.

It would be really swell if someone would pul to¬
gether a tour-guide book of higher mathem¬
atics at the grade/highachool level for people
with access to APL.

Interestingly, Alfred Bork (U. of Cal. at Irvine)
is taking a similar approach to teaching
phyaica, using APL aa a fundamental
language in hla phyaica courses.

SNEAKY REPEATER STATEMENT IN APL’

One of the APL operator*, "iota" { x).
teems to make its own program loop within a line.
When used one-sided, it furnishes a series of
ascending numbers up to the number It's operating
on. This until th« last one Is reached.

You type : J x x T

APL replies : S 8 9 12 15 18 21

In other words, one-sided lots looks to ba
doing It* own llttla loop, Increasing Its starting
number by 1, until It get* to the value on lte right,
and chugs on down the line with each.

Very sneaky way of doing a loop

However! It Isn't really looping, exactly.
What the tots does Is create a one-dimensional
array , a row of integers from 1 up to the number
on its right. Thia result ta whet then move* on
leftward

IBM doesn't sell APL services. Their time¬
sharing APL la available, however , from various
suppliers. Of course, that means you probably
have to have an IBM-type terminal, unless you find
a service that offers APL to the other kind - an
addition which seems to be becoming fashionable.

Usual charge ie about ten bucks an hour
connect charge, plus processing, which depends
on what you're doing. It can easily run over $15
an hour, though, and more for heavy crunching
or printout, so watch it,

The salesman will come to your house or
office, verify that your terminal will work (or
tell you where you can rent one). patiently show
you how to sign on, teach you the language for
maybe an hour If he’s a nice guy, and proffer
the contract.

—►APL services are probably safer to sign
onto. In terms of risked expenses, than moat other
time-sharing systems. (Though of course all
time-sharing involves financial risk.) Because
the system Is restricted only and exactly to APL,
you're not paying for capabilities you won't be
using, or for massive disk storage (which you're
not allowed in most APL services anyway), or
for acres of core memory you might be tempted
to HU.

—► In other words, APL is a comparatively
straight proposition, and highly recommended if
you have a lot of math or statistics you'd like to do
on a fairly small number of cases. Also good for
a variety of other things, though, including fun.

Different vendors offer interesting variations
on IBM’s basic APL\360 package, as noted below.

In other words. theyYompete with each other in
part by adding features to the basic APL\360 pro¬
gram, vying for your business. Each of the ven¬
dors listed also offers various programs in APL
you can use interactively at sn IBM-type terminal,
in many cases using an ordinary typeball and not
seeing the funny characters; though how clear and
easy these programs are will vary.

And remember, of course, that you can do
your own thing, or have others do it for you,
using APL.

APL is also available on the POP-10. and
presumably other non-IBM big machines.

THE VENDORS

Scientific Time-Sharing Corporation (7 316 Wiscon¬
sin Ave., Bethesda MD 20014) calls i(s
version APL*PLUS. They’ll send you a
nice pocket card summarizing the commands.

APL*PLUS offers over twentyfive
concentrators around the country, per¬
mitting local-call services in such metro¬
politan centers as Kalamazoo and Rochester.
(Firms with offices in both cities. please
note.)

They also have an "AUTOSTART"
feature which permits the chaining of pro¬
grams into grand complexes, so you don’t
have to call them all individually.

'» APL'PLUS charges the following for

storage, if you can dig it: $10 PER MILLION
BYTE-DAYS. (A byte Is usually one
character. ) The census is probably taken
once a day.

This firm also services ASCII ter¬
minals. which some people will consider
to be a big help. That means you can have
Interactive users of APL programs at ASCII
terminals, and that you can also program
from the few APL terminals that aren't of
the IBM type.

Time Sharing Resources, Inc. (777 Northern Blvd.,
Great Neck, N Y. 11022) offers a lot of APL
service, including text systems and various
kinds of file handling, under the name
TOTAL/ APL.

Among the interesting festures
Time Sharing Resources, Inc. have added
is an EXECUTE command, which allows an
APL string entered at the keyboard in
user on-line mode to be executed as straight
APL. Thia is heavy .

Perhaps the most versatile-sounding APL service
right now is offered by, of all people, a
subsidiary of the American Can Company.
American Information Services (American
Lane. Greenwich CT 06830) calls their
version VIRTUAL APL, meaning that it can
run in "virtual memory”- - a popular
misnomer for virtually unlimited memory--
and consequently the programmer is hardly
subject to apace limitations at all. Moreover,
files on the AIS system are compatible with
other IBM languages , so you can use APL to
try things out quickly and then convert to
Fortran, Cobol or whatever. (Or. conversely,
a company may go from those other languages
lo APL without chsnglng the way their flies
are stored on this service .) APL may indeed
Intermix with these other languages, how
la unclear.

And the prices look especially good:
$8.75 an hour connect, $15 a month minimum
(actually their minimum disk apace rental
-- 1 IBM cylinder-- so for that amount you
get a lot of storage). But remember there
are atlU core charge*, and $1 per thousand
characters printed or transferred to storage.

In the Weal, a big vendor is Proprietary Computer
Systems. Inc. , Van Nuya. California.

TERMINALS

For an APL terminal, you might Just want a
2741 from IBM (about ■ hundred a month, but on a
year contract).

Or see the Hat under "Terminal*" (p.^),
or ask your friendly APL company when you algn up.

Two more APL terminals, mentioned here
instead of under "Terminals" for no special reason:

Tektronix offers one of its greenie graphics
terminals (see flip Bide) for APL (the model 4013).
This permila APL to draw pictures for you. it
seems to be an ASCII-type unit.

Computer Devices, Inc. supposedly makes an
an APL terminal uBing the nice NCR thermal printer,
which is much faster and quieter than a mechanical
typewriter. Spookier. though. And the special
paper costs a lot of money.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Iverson has a formal book. Ignore it unless you’re
a mathematician: Kenneth E. Iverson,

A Programming Language . Wiley, 1962.

Paul Berry, APL\360 Primer . Student Text .

Available "through IBM branch offices," or
IBM Technical Publications Department.

112 East Post Road. White Plains, NY 10601.
No IBM publication number on it, which tB
sort of odd. 1969.

-♦This is one of the most beautifully
written, simple. cl?ar computer manuals
that is lo be found. Such a statement may
astound readers who have seen other IBM
manuals, but it's true.

A.D. Falkoff and K.E. Iverson, APL\,360 Users'
Manual . Also available from IBM. no
publication number.

POCKET CARDS (giving very compressed sum¬
maries) are available from both:

Scientific Time Sharing Corp.

(see WHERE TO GET IT)
Technical Publications Dept., IBM.

112 East Post Road. White
Plains, N.Y. 10601.

Ask for APL Reference
Data card S210-0007-0. May
cost a quarter or something.

Paul Berry. APL\lI30 Primer . Adapted from 360
manual. Same pub. But for version of APL
that runs on the IBM 1130 minicomputer.

Roy A. Sykes, "The Use and Misuse of APL."

$2 from Scientific Time-Sharing Corp..

7316 Wisconsin Ave. . Bethesda MD 20014.

A joker for you math freaks. Trenchard More,

Jr.. "Axioms and Theorems for a Theory of
Arrays." IBM Journal of Reach . * Devi ..
March 73. 135-157. This is a high-level
thing, a sort of massive set theory of APL.
intended to make APL operators apply to
arrays of arrays. and lead ultimately to the
provability of programs.

"Get on Target with APL.” A suggestive circular
sales thingy. IBM G520-2439-0.

IBM has a videotaped course in APL by A.J. Rose.
(Done 1968.)

£^>What you really need to get started is Berry's

Primer, Falkoff and Iverson’s manual, and a pocket

card. Plus of course the system and the friend to

tutor you.

Power and simplicity do not often go together.

APL is an extremely powerful language for

mathematics . physics, statistics, simulation
and so on.

However, it is not exactly simple. It's not essy
to debug. Indeed. APL programs are hard
to understand because of their density.

And the APL language does not fit very well on

APL is not just a programming language.

It is also used by some people as s definition or
description language, that Is, a form of notation
for stating how things work (laws of nature,
algebraic systems, computers or whatever).

For Instance, when IBM's 360 computer
came out, Iverson and hi* friends did a very
high-class article describing formally in APL
Just what 360* do (tha machine's architecture).

But of course thia was even less comprehensible
than the 360 programming manual.

Falkoff. A.D. . K.E. Iverson and E.H.

Sussenguth. "A Formal De»cription
of System/360.” IBM System* Journal ,
v .3 no. 3. 1964.

The formal deacriptlon In APL.

IBM 9y»tem/36C Operating System : Aaaembler
Language . Document Number
C28-6514-X (where XU* numbar
signifying th* lateat edition). IBM
Technical Publication*. Whit* PUln*
New York.

The Menual

Few people know all or APL. or would want to.
The operations are diverse and obscure.
and many or them are comprehensible only
to people in mathematical fields.

However. if you know a dozen or so you can
really get off the ground

As In BASIC, you can use subscripts to
get at specific elements in arrays. Referring to
the examples above, if you type

JOE [2]

you get back on your typewriter its value

and If you type

NORA [2.^

you get back

There are basically four kinds of information
used by APL, and all of them can be put in arrays.
Three of these types are numerical, and arrays of
them look like this on paper:

Integer arrays: 2 4 -6 8 10 2048

Scalar arrays: 2.5 '3.1416 0.001 2795333.1

(a scalar Is something that can be
measured on a ruler-like scale,
where there are always points
in betweeen.)

Logical arrays: 1 0 0 0 1 0 l

(these arrays of ones and zeroes are
called "logical" for a variety of
reasons; in this case we could call them
"logical" simply because they are used
for picking and choosing and deciding.)

These three numerical types of information may be
freely intermixed in your arrays. One more type,
however. 1 b sllowed. It’s hard to figure out from
the manuals, but evidently this type can't be
mixed in with the others too freely. We refer to
the alphabetical or "literal" array, as in

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

Now , pre-written APL programs can print out
literal information, end accept it from a user at
a terminal , which is why APL is good for the
creation of systems for naive users (see "Good-Guy
Systems," p. 'J).

Literal vectors may be picked apart,
rearranged and assembled by all the regular APL
operators. That's how we twiddle our text.

CRASHING THE SYMBOLS TOGETHER

Now that we know about the operators and
the array*, what does APL do?

It works on arrays, singly and in pairs,
according to those funny-looking symbols, as the
APL processor scans right-to-left.

IVERSON’S TAFFY-PULL

A number of basic APL operators help you
stretch, squish and pull apart your arrays.
Consider the lowly comma (called "ravel," which
mean* the same aa "unravel").

,A forget A'a old dimensions,

make it one-dimensional.

A.B make A and B one long
one-dimensional array.

Here la how we make things appear and disappear.
("Compreaalon.")

A/B A must be a one-dimensional
array of ones and zeroes.

The result ia those elements
of B selected by the ones.
Example:

1 0 1 / c a t
results in

The opposite alath has the opposite effect,
inserting extra null elements where there
are zeroes

1 1 0 l\3 5 »
reaulta in

3 5 0 9

Here's another selector. Thie operator
takes (he first or last few of A, depending on sin
and sign of B:

Bf A

and B ^ A ia the opposite .

If you want to know the relative position* of
number* of different sice* in a one-dimenaional
array.

^ (name of array)

will tell you It gives you the position#. in order
of else, of the numbers. And ^ does it for
descending order.

These are lust samples. The list goes on
and on.

SAMPLE PROGRAMS

Here is an APL program that types out
backwards what you type in. First look at the
program, then the explanation below.

V REV

l ') '*-0

W 0-*'

Explanation . The down-pointing (riangle9
("dels") symbolize the beginning and end of a
program, which in this case we have called REV.
On Line 1, the "Quote-Quad" symbol (on the right)
causes the APL processor to wait for alphabetical
input. Presumably the user will type something.
The user's line of input is stuffed into thing or
array 1. The user's carriage return tells the APL
processor he has finished, so it continues in the
program. On the second line. APL takes array 1
and does a one-sided <£> to it. which happens to
mean turning it around. Left-arrow into the
quote-quad symbol means print it out.

Because of APL's compactness, indeed, this
magnificent program can all go on one line:

^ REV

First the input goes into I, then the processor does
a p I (reversal) and puts it out.

And here is our old friend, the fortune-cookie
prisoner.

V INF

Q 4— 'HELP. 1 AM CAUGHT IN A LOOP*
-> 1
V

On line 1 the program prints out whatever's in
quotes. And line 2 causes it to go bock and do
line 1 again. Forever.

THE T«T-A»|t>-&eAWeH 'VIM.

It should be mentioned at this point that
branching tests are conducted in APL programs
by specifying conditions which are either true or
false, and APL's answer is 1 if true, 0 if false.

(This is another thing these logical arrays are for.)

Example:

This operation leaves the number 1, because 3
is greater than 2. So you could branch on a teat
with something like

—> 7 * A > B

which branches to line 7 in the program if A is
greater than B. and is ignored (as an unexccutable
branch to line zero) if B is greater than A.

Some love It, some hate it.

THE APL ENVIRONMENT

Aside from Ihe APL language itself, to
program in APL you must learn a lot of "system"
commands, alphabetical commands by which to telt
the APL processor what you want to do in general
-- what to store, what to bring forth from storage,
and so on.

Ordinarily you have a workspace . a collec¬
tion of programs and data which you may summon
by name. When it comes-- that ia, when the com¬
puter has fetched this material and announced on
your terminal that It la ready-- you can run the
program* and use the data in your workspace.

You can also have passwords for your different
workspaces, so others al other terminals cannot
tamper with your stuff.

This ia not the place to go into the syatem
commands. IT you're serious, you esn learn them
from the book or the APL salesman,

There are many, many different error
messages that the APL processor can send you,
depending on the circumstances. It is possible
to make many, many mlalakes in APL, and
there are error messages for all of them . All
of them, that ia. that look to the computer like
errors: if you do something permissible that's
not what you intended, the computer will not
tell you.

But It ia a terminal language, designed to
help people muddle through.

HWf

mwifoe ufcMKSfUi

Iverson's notation is built around the
curious principle of having the same symbols mean
two things depending on context. (Goodness
knows he uses enough different symbols; doubling
up at least means he doesn't need any more.) It
turns out that this notation represents a consistent
series of operations in astounding combinations.

The overall APL language, really. Is the
carrying through of this notation to create an im¬
mensely powerful programming language. The
impetus obviously came from the desire to make
various intricate mathematical operations easy to
command. The result, however, is a programming
language with great power for simpler teaks aa well.

Now, the consequences of this overall idea
were not determined by God. They were worked
out by Iverson, very thoughtfully, so as to come
out symmetrical-looking and easy to remember.

What we see is the clever exploitation of apparent
but Inexact symmetries in the ideas. Often APL’s
one-sided and two-sided pairs of operators are
more suggestively similar than really the same
thing.

When Iverson assigns one-sided and two-
sided meanings to a symbol, often the two meanings
may look natural only because Iverson is such an
artist. Example:

two-sided one-sided

AX B a B

A times B the sign of B

This makes sense. To argue that it is Inherent in
"taking away half the idea of multiplication."
however, is dubious.

Some symmetries Iverson has managed to
come up with are truly remarkable. The arrow,
for instance. The left arrow:

Assignment statement: B (which
may have been computed during
the leftward scan) is assigned
the name of A;

and the right arrow:

—* B

The jump statement, where B
(which may have been com¬
puted during Ihe leftward scan)
is a statement number; the
program now goes and execute*
that line.

This symmetry is mystically interesting because
the assignment and jump statements are so basic
to programming.

Or consider this:

print X.

X«-Q

take input from the user and
stuff it into X.

Another weird example: supposedly the
conditional branch

—> b/a

(one way of writing, "jump to A if B is true")
ia a special case of the "compression" operator.
(Berry 360 primer. 72 and 165.) This is very
hard to understand, although it seems clear while
you're reading it.

On the other hand, there is every indication
that APL Is so deep you keep finding new truths
in It. (Like Che above paragraph.) The whole
thing is just unbelievable . Hooray for all that.

APL FOR USER-LEVEL SYSTEMS

(See "Good-Guy Systems." p. I> )

Because APL can aoiicit text input from a user and analyze II,
tha language Is powerful for the creation of uaer-level environments
and ay atom*-- with the drawback, universal to all IBM terminals,
that Input line* mual end with specific characters, tn other word*,
it can't be as fully Interactive a* computer languages that use ASCII
terminals.

Needlaas to say, the mathematical elegance and power of the
system la completely unnecessary for most user-level system*. But
it's nlc* to know it's there.

APL la probably best for systems with well-defined and seg¬
regated files - "array type problems." like payroll, account* and
so on. It is not suited for much larger amorphous and evolutionary
stuff, the way Hat languages like TRAC are. Don't use APL 1/
you're going to store Urge evolving texts or huge brokerage data
base*, like what tanker* are free In the Mediterranean

Good luck! The quickest payoff may lie in ualng APL to replace buaineae

form* and hasten the flow of information through a company. A
salesman on the road with an APL terminal, for instance, can at once
enter hla order* in the computer from the customer'# office. checking
inventory directly . If the program ia up.

Here is another example showing how we chug
along the row of symbols and take it apart, Again,
the alphabetical entities represent things.

__ first operation (one-sided),

second operation (two-sided)

Try dividing up these examples:

Qp ROMEO

ELEANOR <3> SAM SUSIE

One more thing needs to be noted. Not only
can we work out the sequences of operations, from
right to left, between the symbols; the computer can
carry them out in a stable fashion . Which is of
course essential.

INSIDE

The truth of the matter 1 b that APL in the com¬
puter is a continuing succession of things being
operated on and replaced iii the work area.

first thing
fl ^YAROli

thing that results from operation Pf
done to that by UG *Y

and so on.

What is effectively happening is that the APL
processor is holding what it's working on in a
holding area. The way it carries out the scan of
the APL language, there only has to be one thing
in there at a time.

(tt t

Suppose we have a simple user program,

Y + - Z

Starting at the right of this user program , the
main APL program puts Z into the work area. That’s
the first thing. Then, stepping left in the user
program, the APL processor follows the rules and
discovers that the next operation makes It

- Z

which happens to mean, "the negation of Z." So it
carries this out on Z and replaces Z with the result.
-Z. Then, continuing to scan leftward, the APL
processor continues to replace what was In the work
area with the result of each operation in the suc¬
cessive lines of the user program, till the program
la completed.

l- rcij/t /

p -z

r'|l.u 1 1*1 <1

•y 4 -r

SOME APL OPERATORS

It would be insane to enumerate them all,
but here is a sampling of APL’s operators. They're
all on the pocket cards (see Bibliography).

For old times' sake, here are our friends:

(And a cousin thrown in for symmetry.)

♦A plain A

(whatever A should happen to be)
A+B A plus B

(whatever A should happen to B.
heh heh)

-B negation of B

A-B A minus B

xB the sign of B

(expressed as -1,0 or l)

AxB A times B

And here are some groovies:

! A factorial A

(1*2* 3 ... up to A)

A! B the number of possible

combinations you can get from B.
taken A at a time
?A a random integer

taken from array A
A?B take some Integers at random
from B. How many? A.

But, of course, APL goes on and on. There
are dozens more (including symbols made of more
than one weird APL symbol. printed on top of each
other to make a new symbol).

Consider the incredible power. Single APL
symbols give you logarithms, trigonometric
functions, matrix functions, number system conver¬
sions, logs to any arbitrary base, and powers of e
(a mysterious number of which engineers are fond).

Other weird things . You can apply an oper¬
ation to all the elements of an array using the /
operator: +/A is the sum of everything in A, x/A
is the combined product of everything in A. And
so on. Whew.

As you may suspect. APL programs can be
incredibly concise. (This is a frequently-heard
criticism: that the conciseness makes them hard
to understand and hard to change.)

MAKE YOUR OWN

Finally and gloriously, the user may define
hia own functions, either one-sided or two-sided,
with alphabetical names. For instance, you can
create your own one-sided operator ZONK, as in

ZONK B

and even a two-sided ZONK,

A ZONK B

which can then go right in there with the big boys:

A ^ ZONK \ | B

Don't ask what it means, but it's allowed.

APL THINGS , TO GO WITH YOUR OPERATORS

As we said, APL has operators (already
explained) and things . The things can be plain
numbers, or Arrays (already mentioned under
BASIC) . Think of them as rows, boxes and
superboxes of numbers:

2 4 6 8 10 a one-dimensional thing

2 4

35 a two-dimensional thing

s a

6 • s three-dimensional thing,

seen from the front. Maybe
we better look at the levels
side by side:

13 2 4

5 7 6 8

APL can have Things with four dimensions, five and
so on, but we won’t trouble you here with pictures.

Oh yes, and finally a no-dimensional thing.
Example:

75.2

It is called no-dimensional because there is only
one of it, so it is not a row or a box.

Seriously, these are arrays , and Iverson's
APL works them over, turns them Inside out, twists
and zaps through to whatever the answers are.

As in BASIC and TRAC, the arrays of APL
are really stored in the computer's core memory,
associated with the name you give them. The
arrays may be of all different sizes and dimen¬
sionality:

" fT.5 7.1 89.00 61

(empty array, but a name is
saved for it.)

QeeI

1371416]

(a zero-dimensional array,
since it's only one number.)

Each array is really a series of memory locations
with its label and boxing information— dimensions
and lengths-- stored separately. One very nice
thing about APL ia that arrays can keep changing
their sizes freely, and this need be of no concern
to the APL programmer. (The arrays can also be
boxed and reboxed in different dimensions just by
changing the boxing information-- with an operator
called "ravel.")

FRE«C 5 !

a mini that does nothing but APL,
ia now available from a Canadian firm for the mere pittance of

THREE THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS,

the price of many a mere terminal. This according to
Computerworld , 10 Oct 73.

Run. don't walk, to Micro Computer Machines. Inc..

4 Lansing Sq.. WUlowdale. M2J 1T1, Ontario, Canada. That
S3500 gets you a 16K memory, the APL program, keyboard and
numerical keyboard, and plasma display. Cassette (which
apparently stores and retrieves arrays by name when called
by the program) is $1500 extra. RUNS ON BATTERIES. Sorry,
no green stamps. (Note that the APL processor takes up most
of the 16K, but you can get more.)

The rumor that IBM has APL on a chip , inside a 8electrlc
— which therefore does all these things with no external
connection to any (external) computer-- remain# unsubstantiated.
The rumor has been around for some lime.

But it’s quite poealble.

The thing ia, it would probably destroy IBM'a entire
product line-- and pricing edifice.

TWO-SIDED OPERATORS

SAME SYMBOLS WORK BOTH WAYS

Some people call it a "scientific" language.
Some people call it a "mathematical" language.

Some people are most struck by its use for inter¬
active systems, so to them it’s an interactive
language. But most of us just think of it as THE
LANGUAGE WITH ALL THE FUNNY SYMBOLS,
and here they are:

*punoc*w+cIA\sQ;f'A

<*S2=>)V:l_(+T-+-l~0?L-
12 3846 5 7]9. BFlUN+ITOQD+

PRVCAZ*WYEMO / XL,SJGXH

Enthusiasts see it as a language of incon¬
ceivable power with extraordinary uses. Cynics
remark that it has all kinds of extraordinary
powers for inconceivable uses— that is, a weird
elegance, much of which has no use at all, and
some of which gets in the way.

This is probably wrong. APL is a terrific
and beautiful triumph of the mind, and a very
useful programming language. It is not for every¬
body, but neither is chess. It is for bright chil¬
dren, mathematicians, and companies who want
to build interactive systems but feel they should
stick with IBM.

APL is one of IBM's better products, probably
because it is principally the creation of one man,
Kenneth Iverson. It is mainly run on 360 and
370 computers, though implementations exist
for the DEC PDP-10 and perhaps other popular
machines. (Actually Iverson designed the lan¬
guage at Harvard and programmed it on his own
initiative after moving to IBM; added to the pro¬
duct line by popular demand, it was not a planned
product and might in fact be a hazard to the firm,
should it catch on big.)

APL is a language of arrays, with a fascinat¬
ing notation. The array system and the notation
can be explained separately. and so they will.

Let's just say the language works on things
modified successively by operators . Their order
and result is based upon those fiendish chicken
scratches, Iverson notation.

THAT NIFTY NOTATION

The first thing to understand about APL
is the fiendishly clever system of notation that
Iverson has worked out. This system (sometimes
called Iverson notation) allows extremely complex
relations and computer-type events to be expressed
simply. densely and consistently.

(Of course, you can't even type it without
an IBM Selectric typewriter and an APL ball.

Note the product-line tie-in.)

In old-fashioned notations, such as ordinary
arithmetic, we are used to the idea of an operator
between two things. Like

These, too, occur in APL; indeed, APL
can also nest two-sided operators-- that is, put
them one inside the other, like the leaves of
a cabbage. Old-fashioned notations nest with
parentheses. But APL nests leftward. It works
according to a very simple right-to-left rule.

t X y X 2 + 2

the result of this

is operated on by

the next thing and operator,

yielding another result

which is in turn operated on by
the next thing and operator,
yielding final result.

ONE-SIDED OPERATORS

We are also used to some one-sided operators
in our previous life. For instance:

--, w.c ajuiwia nave DOtn a

one-sided meaning and a two-sided meaning; but,
thank goodness, they can be easily kept straight.

Here is a concrete example: the symbol T
or "ceiling." Used one-sided, the result of
operator \ applied to something numerical is the
integer just above the number it is applied to:
l 7 - 2 is 8. Used two-sided, the result is which¬
ever of the numbers it's between larger:

10 f 6 is 10. (There is also I , floor, which you
can surely figure out.)

Now, when you string things out into a long
APL expression, Iverson’s notation determines
exactly when an operator is one-sided and when
it is two-sided:

As you go from right to left,

another thing?) OP THING
another op? _

you generally start with a thing on the right. Then
comes an operator. If the next symbol is another
thing, then the operator is to be treated as a two-
sided operator (because it's between two things).

If the object beyond the first operator is another
operator, however, that means APL is supposed to
stop and carry out the first operator on a one-sided
basis. Example:

means the negation of 1;

means negating that .

APL can also nest one-sided operators.

first operator is
applied to AT;

result is worked on
by second operator;

result is worked on
by third operator^

result is worked on by
fourth operator,
yielding final result.

Conclusion:

It's two-sided.
Interpretation:

"subtract B from A .

Conclusion:

The first operator
is one-sided.
Interpretation:

"negate B."

Then take next symbol.

A WCIRJ) EMMfce, T» HELP WITH TH£

Just for kicks, let us make up a notation
having nothing to do with computers, using these
Iverson principles:

1) If an operator or symbol is between two
names of things , carry it out two-sidedly.
If not, carry it out one-sidedly.

2) Go from right to left.

The best simple example I can think of involves
file cards on the table (named A, B, C...) and
operators looking like this:

90) A 90} B _—|

The notation is based on operators modifying
things . Let’s use alphabetic symbols for things
and play with pictures for a minute.

c*w

In considering the successive meanings of this
rebus we are proceeding from right to left, as
you note, and each new symbol adds meaning.
ThiB is the general idea.

You will note, in this example, the curious
arrangement whereby you can have several
pictures . or operators. in a row . This Is one
of the fun features of the language.

0) 45) 90) 180) 45) 907 180)

to which we may assign the following meanings:

ONE-SIDED: ROTATION OPERATORS

0) A do nothing to A

45) A rotate A clockwise 45*

90) A rotate A clockwise 90’

etc.

TWO-SIDED: STAPLING OPERATORS
B 45) A staple A (thing named on the right)
to B (thing named on the left)
at a position 45* clockwise from
middle of B’s centerline.

And equivalently for other angles.

Now, using these rules, and letting our things
be any file cards that are handy, here are some results:

457 A 90) 90) B /x

It’s hard to believe, but there you are. This
notation seems adequate to make a whole lot of
different stapled patterns.

Exercise ! Use this nutty file card notation
to program the making of funny patterns , Practice
with a friend and see if you can communicate
patterns through these programs, one person
uncomprehendingly carrying out the other s
program and being surprised .

The point of all this has been to show the
powerful but somewhat startling way that brief
scribbles in notations of this type can have all sorts
of results.

which is allowed to survive as is, because the moving finger
of the TRAC scanner does not re-scan the result .

It is left to the very curious to try to figure out why
this is needed.

Whatever can be executed
is replaced by

its result.

This may or may not
yield something

which is in turn
executable.

When nothing left is executable,
what's left

is printed out.

That's the TRAC language.

me® pf^mvfs*-

OUTPUT.

PS, string

PRINT STRING: prints out the second argument.

INPUT.

READ STRING: this command is replaced by a string of
characters typed in by the user, whose end is signalled bv a
changeable "meta" character. y

CM, arg2

CHANGE META: first character of second argument becomes
RC new meta character. May be carriage-return code.

READ CHARACTER: this command is replaced by the next
character the user types in. Permits highly responsive inter¬
active systems.

DISK COMMANDS.

SB, blockname, forml, form2 ...

__ s TORE BLOCK: under block name supplied, stores forms listed
FB, blockname

FETCH BLOCK: contents of named block are quietly brought in
to forms storage from disk.

FAST ANSWERBACK IN TRAC LANGUAGE

TRAC Language can be used for fast answerback to
simple problems. Typing in Long executable TRAC expres¬
sions causes the result, if any, to be printed back out
immediately.

For naive users, however, the special advantage is in
how easily TRAC Language may be used to program fast
answerback environments of any kind.

A SERIOUS LANGUAGE; BUT BE WILLING

TO BELIEVE WHAT YOU SEE

TRAC Language,is, besides being an easy language to
learn, very powerful for text and storage applications.

Conventional computer people don't necessarily believe
or like It.

For instance, as a consultant I once had programmed,
in TRAC Language, a system for a certain intricate form
of business application. It worked. It ran. Anybody could
be taught to use it in five minutes. The client was consider¬
ing expanding it and installing a complete system. They
asked another consultant.

It couldn't be done in TRAC Language, said the other
consultant; that's some kind of a "university" language.

End of project.

HOW TO GET IT

There have been, until recently, certain difficulties
about getting access to a TRAC processor. Over the years,
Mooers has worked with his own processors in Cambridge.
Experimenters here and there have tried their hands at
programming it, with little compatibility in their results.
Mooers has worked with several large corporations, who said
said they wanted to try processors to assess the value of the
the language, but those endeavors brought nothing out to
the public.

FINALLY, however, TRAC Language service is pub-
lically available, in a fastidiously accurate processor and
with Mooers' blessing, on Computility™timesharing service.
They run PDP-10 service In the Boston-to-Washington
area. (From elsewhere you have to pay long distance. )

The charge should run $12 to $15 per hour in business hours,
Less elsewhen. But this depends to some extent on what
your program does, and is hence unpredictable. A licensed
TRAC Language processor may be obtained from Mooers
for your own favorite PDP-10. Processors for other com¬
puters, including minis, are in the planning stage.

TRAC Language is now nicely documented in two new
books by Mooers, a beginner’s manual and a standardization
book (see Bibliography).

Since Mooers operates a small business, and must
make a livelihood from it, he has adopted the standard
business techniques of service mark and copyright to
protect his interests. The service marie "TRAC" serves
to identify his product in the marketplace, and is an
assurance to the public that the product exactly meets the
published standards By law, the "TRAC" mark may not
be used on programs or products which do not come from
Rockford Research, Inc.

Following IBM, he Is using copyright to protect his
documentation and programs from copying and adaptation
without authority.

Mooers also stands ready to accommodate academic
students and experimenters who wish to try their hands at
programming a TRAC processor. An experimenter's
license for use of the copyright material may be obtained
for a few dollars, provided you do not intend to use tne
resulting programs commercially.

For information of all kinds, Including lists of latest
literature and application notes, contact:

Calvin N. Mooers
Rockford Research, Inc.

140-1/2 Mount Auburn Street

Cambridge, Mass. 02138 Tel. (617)876-6776

MAIN FORM COMMANDS.

DS, formname, contents

DEFINE STRING. Discussed in text.

CL, formname, plugl, plug2, plug3 ...

CALL: brings form from forms storage to working program.
Plugl Is fitted into every hole (segment gap) numbered 1,
plug2 into every hole numbered 2, and so on.

SS, formname, punchoutl, punchout2 ...

SEGMENT STRING: this command replaces every occurrence
of punchoutl with a hole (segment gap) numbered 1, and so on.

INTERNAL FORM COMMANDS.

(All of these use a little pointer, or form pointer , that marks a place
in the form. If there is no form remaining after the pointer, these
instructions act on their last argument, which is otherwise ignored.)
IN, formname, string, default

Looks for specified string IN the form, starting at pointer. If
not found, pointer unmoved. (NOTE: string search can also be
done nicely with the SS command.)

CC, formname, default

CALL CHARACTER: brings up next character in form, moves
pointer to after it.

CN, formname, no. of characters, default

CALL N: brings up next N characters, moves pointer to after
them.

CS, formname, default

CALL SEGMENT: brings up everything to next segment gap,
moves pointer to it.

CR, formname

CALL RESTORE: moves pointer back to beginning of form.

MANAGING FORMS STORAGE
LN, divider

LIST NAMES: replaced by all form names in forms storage,
with any divider between them. Divider is optional.

DD, namel, name2 ...

DELETE DEFINITION: destroys named forms in forms storage.
DA

DELETE ALL: gets rid of all forms in forms storage.

TEST COMMANDS.

EQ, firstthing, secondthing, ifso, ifnot

Tests if EQual: if firstthing is same as secondthing, what’s left
is ifso ; if not equal, what's left is ifnot .

GR, firstthing, secondthing, ifso, ifnot

Tests whether firstthing is numerically GReater than second¬
thing. If so, what's left is ifso ; if not, what's left is ifnot .

OH YEAH, ARITHMETIC.

(All these are handled in decimal arithmetic, a character at a time,
and defined only for two integers. Everything else you write your¬
self as a shorty program.)

}

mentioned In text.

BOOLEAN COMMANDS.

(Several exist in the language, but could not possibly be understood
from this writeup.)

♦ Description of TRAC language primitives adapted by permission from
"TRAC, A Procedure-Describing Language for the Reactive Typewriter, "
copyright ©1966 by Rockford Research, Inc.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Calvin N. Mooers, The Beginner's Manual for TRACf Language,
300 pages, $10705", from Rockford Research, Inc.

(See "Where to Get It.") ~

Calvin N. Mooers, Definition and Standard for TRAC^T-64

Language, 86 pages7^5700, from Rockford Research, Inc.

Calvin N. Mooers, "TRAC, A Procedure-Describing Language
for the Reactive Typewriter," Communications of the ACM ,
v. 9, n. 3, pp. 215-219 (March 1966). Historlcpaper, out of
print. This paper is copyrighted, and the copyright Ls owned
by Rockford Research, Inc. , through legal assignment from
the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc.

And for those who want to understand the depth of the standardiza¬
tion problem, Mooers offers freebie reprints of:

Calvin N. Mooers, "Accommodating Standards and Identification
of Programming Languages," Communications of the ACM,
v.ll, n. 8, pp. 574-576 (August 1968).

{t >

an interpretive language

(each step carried out directly
by the processor without conversion
to another form first);
an extensible language

(you can add your own commands
for your own purposes);
a Ust-proceBsing language

(for handling complex and amorphous
forms of data that don't fit in boxes
and arrays).

It is one of the few such lan¬
guages that fits in little computers.

3. DRILLING THE HOLES

The holes (called by Mooers segment gaps ) are created
by the SEGMENT STRING instruction.

# (SS, formname, whateverl, whateve r2 ...)

where "formname" is the form you want to put holes in and
the whatevers are things you want to replace by holes.
Example: Suppose you have a form

i INSULT

YOU ARE A CREEP]

You make this more general by means of the SEGMENT
STRING instruction:

#(SS, INSULT, CREEP)

TEST COMMANDS IN TRAC LANGUAGE

There are test commands In TRAC Language, but like
everything else they work on strings of characters. Thus
they may work on numbers or text. Consider the EQ
command (test If equal):

#(EQ, ftrstthing, secondthlng, if so, ifnot)

where "firstthing" and "secondthlng" are the strings being
compared, and ifso and ifnot are the alternatives. If first¬
thing is the same as secondthlng, then ifso is what the
TRAC processor does, and ifnot is forgotten. Example:

#(EQ, 3, #(SU, 5, 2), HOORAY, NUTS)

If it turns out that 3 is equal to #(SU, 5, 2), which it is, then
all that would be left of the whole string would be

HOORAY

while otherwise the TRAC processor would produce NUTS.

To most computer people this looks completely inside-
out, with the thing to do next appearing at the center of the
test instruction. Others find this feature at-trac-tive.

DISK OPERATIONS

Now for the juicy disk operations. Storing things on *
disk can occur as an ordinary TRAC command.

#(SB, name,forml, form2,form3 ... )

creates a place out somewhere on disk with the name you
give it, and puts in it the forms you've specified. Example:

resulting in

#(SB, JUNK, TOM, DICK, HARRY)

[INSULT^ t ___

are A [ ]]

which can be filled in at a more appropriate time.

Fuller example. Suppose we type into the TRAC
processor the following:

#(DS, THINGY, ONE FOR THE MONEY AND TWO FOR THE SHOW)
#(SS, THINGY, ONE, TWO, )

- note space

We have now created a form THINGY and replaced parts of
it with segment gaps. Since each of the later arguments of
SEGMENT STRING specifies a differently numbered gap,
we will have gaps numbered [l], [2), and [3]. The gap [1]
will have replaced the word ONE, the gap [2] will have
replaced the word TWO, and a lot of gaps numbered [3] will
have replaced all the spaces in the form (since the fifth
argument of SS was a space). The resulting form is:

[thingy]

([II ^R[3rTHEt3]MONEY[3)ANDf3]T2jj3 ]F OR[3]THE[3]SHOW\

We can get it to print out interestingly by typing #(CL,
THINGY, RUN, HIDE) (since after the call, the plugged-in
form will still be in the forms storage.) This is printed:

RUNFORTHEMONEYANDHIDEFORTHESHOW

or perhaps, if we use a carriage return for the last
argument , we can get funny results. The call

#(THINGY, NOT A FIG, THAT,[carriage return]

should result in

NOT A FIG

FOR

THE

MONEY

AND

THAT

FOR

THE

SHOW

In TRAC Language, every command
is replaced by its result
“ the program's execution proceeds.
This is ingenious, weird and highly effective.

T * $ TAEU i H Ftevp

and they’re stored. If you want them later you say
#(FB, JUNK)
and they're back.

Because you can mix the disk operations in with every¬
thing else so nicely, you can chain programs and changing
environments with great ease to travel smoothly among
different systems, circumstances, setups.

Here is a stupid program that scans all Incoming text
for the word SHAZAM. If the word SHAZAM appears, it
clears out everything, calls a whole nother disk block, and
welcomes its new master. Otherwise nothing happens. If
you have access to a TRAC system (or really want to work
on it), vou may be able to figure it out. (RESTART must
be in the workspace to begin.)

j RE start | __

— /#(Ds7tEMP, #(RS))#(SS, TEMP, )#(RPT)|

#(EQ~SHAZAM, *(TEST), (#(EVENT)))#(RPT)] -

n (?(CS]TEMP, (* (RESTART)))]

IeventL ______—--a

(DA)#(FB, MARVEL)*(PS. WELCOME O MASTER)]

In this example, however, you may have noticed more
parentheses than you expected. Now for why.

PROTECTION AND ONE-SHOT

The last thing we'll talk about is the other two syntactic
layouts.

We’ve already told you about the main syntactic layout
of TRAC Language, which is

H )

It turns out that two more layouts are needed, which we may
call PROTECTION and ONE-SHOT. Protection is simply

( )

which prevents the execution of anything between the
parentheses. The TRAC processor strips off these plain
parentheses and moves on, leaving behind what was in
them but not having executed it. (But It may come back . )

An obvious use is to put around a program you're designing:

stripped stripped

but other uses turn up after you've experimented a little.
The last TRAC command arrangement looks like this

*H )

and you can put any command in it, except that its result
will only be carried one level

##{CL, ZOWIE, 3,4)

results in (using the forms we defined earlier).

the magic scan

The secret of combining TRAC commands la that
•very command, when executed, la replaced by Its answer ;
and whatever may result Is In him executed.

There la an exact procedure for this:

SCAN FROM LEFT TO RIGHT

UNTIL A RIGHT PARENTHESIS;
r—> RE SOLVE THE CONTENTS OF THE
I PAIRED COMMAND PARENTHESES

/ (execute and replace by the command’s result);

STARTING AT THE BEGINNING OF THE RESULT,
KEEP SCANNING LEFT-TO-RIGHT
[_ UNTIL A RIGHT PARENTHESIS. - j

WHEN YOU GET TO THE END, PRINT OUT
WHAT’S LEFT.

4H 'HUM(>/✓>*, fljeotrr sfcps ,*% a fUkt ioo%

ope* l*s f*r**thdf

& (powi)

IT'S SUP£KLW(HJA&£/

The beauty part la how it all works so good.

HELP; I AM TRAPPED IN A PROGRAM LOOP

An arithmetic example - bo you get the procedure.

#(AD,2,#(AD,3.4))

■-H

first right parenthesis
found.

execute what's In the
command parentheses
& replace

with their answer, leaving:

scan to next right parenthesis

execute L replace

find no more parentheses
print out what's left.

You might try this yourself on a longer example:

♦ (AD,*(SU, *{AD,3,4),*(SU,7,3)),1)

Here Is an Interesting case:

• (AD, 1)

There's no third argument to add to the 1 — but that’s
okay In TRAC Language. 1 it remains.

PULLING IN OTHER STUFF

The core memory available to the use Is divided Into
two areas, which we may call WORKSPACE and STANDBY.

The Standby area contains strings of characters with names.
Here could be some examples:

names strings

f HAROLD

\5432l]

llgg . HELP: I AM TRAPPED IN A LOOP)«(C4 PRO GRAM)]

[galoshes]

[I MUSTN’TF ORGET MY GALOSHES[]

There Is an Instruction that moves things from the
Standby area to the Workspace. This is the CALL
Instruction.

*(CL, whatever)

The CALL Instruction pulls In a copy of the named string
to replace It, the call Instruction, in the work area. The
string named In the call Instruction also stays In the Standby
area until you want to get rid of It. Example:

#(CL, HAROLD)

would be replaced by

54321

Suppose we say In a program
»(AD, 1, #{CL, HAROLD))

Then the result Is:

54322

Now let’s do a program loop using the CALL. If we
type In to our TRAC processor

*(CL, PROGRAM)

U should type

HELP; 1 AM TRAPPED IN A PROGRAM LOOP
HELP; I AM TRAPPED IN A PROGRAM LOOP
HELP; I AM TRAPPED IN A PROGRAM LOOP

so It prints that . If it had said

HELP, I AM TRAPPED IN A PROGRAM LOOP
the PRINT STRING command would only have printed
HELP

since a comma ends an argument In TRAC language.

Now, the PRINT STRING command leaves no result, so
It Is vaporized; all we have left In the work area is

»{CL, PROGRAM)

which is now scanned. But that’s another CALL, and when
It Is executed by fetching the object called PROGRAM, Its
replacement In the work area is

• (PS, HELP; I AM TRAPPED IN A PROGRAM LOOP)*(CL. PROGRAM)

and guess what. We done it again.

(Another example of TRAC Language’s consistency:
suppose it executes the command

*(CL, EBENEZER)

when there Is no string called EBENEZER. The result la
nothing; so that command disappears, leaving no residue. )

THE FORM COMMANDS

Let us be a little more precise. The Standby area
Is really called by Mooers "forms storage, " and a string-
with-name that ts kept there Is called a form. One reason
for this terminology 19 that these strings can consist of
programs or arrangements that we may wont to fit together
and combine. Thus they are "forms".

1. CREATING A FORM

To create a form, you use the DEFINE STRING
command:

#(DS, formname, contents)

The arguments used by DS give a name to the form and
specify what you want to have stored In it. Example:

#(DS, ELVIS, 1234)

creates a form named ELVIS with contents 1234.

(Note that to get a program into a form without Its being
executed on the way requires some preparation. For this,
"protection” is used; see end of article.)

It turns out that DEFINE STRING Is the closest TRAC
Language has to an assignment statement (as in BASIC,
LET A = WHATEVER). If you want to use a variable A,
say, to Store the current result of something, In TRAC
Language you create a form named A.

•CDS, A, WHATEVER)

Whenever the value of A Is changed, you redefine form A.

2. CALLING A FORM.

As noted already,

• (CL, ELVIS)
will then be replaced by

1234

But a wonderful extension of this, that hasn't been
mentioned yet, Is

2A. THE IMPLICIT CALL.

You don’t even have to say CL to call a form. If the
first argument of a command — that Is, the first string
Inside the command parentheses - ts not a command known
to TRAC Language, why, the TRAC processor concludes
that the first argument may be the name of a form. So now
If you type

Indefinitely.

Why Is this? Let’s go through the steps.

We noted that tn our Standby area we had a string
named PROGRAM which consisted of

#CP8, HELP; I AM TRAPPED IN A PROGRAM LOOP)#(CL. PROG
The TRAC processor scans across It to the first right parenthesf
»(P8, HELP; 1 AM TR APPED IN A PR OGRAM lo op )«(CL, PROG

and now executes this. ~~ ~ ^

PRInVstr*™^*! PS “ th * PFUNT STRING instruction.
th™L ? ° Ut "* * eCOnd ar K um '"'. forgets

me rut. But the oaty argument after PS Im

#(AD, *CHAROLD>, #(ELViS))

It will first note, on reaching the rlght-paren of the
HAROLD command, that since HAROLD Is 54321, you
evidently wanted this:

#(AD, 54321, f (ELVIS))

rescan of result

and then will do the same with ELVIS:

*<AD, 54321,1234)

so that pretty soon it'll type for you

This language is marvelously suited to date base management,

management information systems, interactive query systems,
•nd the broad spectrum of "business'' programming.

For large-scsle scientific number crunching, not so good.

With one exception: "Infinite precision" srithmctic. when
people want things to hundreds of decimal places.

Chugga chugg*.

This implicit call Is the trick that allows people to create
their own languages very quickly. In not very tong, you could
create your own commands - say ZAPP,MELVIN and some
more; and while at first It Is more convenient to type In the
TRAC format

•(ZAPP, * (MELVIN))

it Is very little trouble in TRAC Language to create new
syntaxes of your own Uke

ZAPP ! MELVIN

that are Interpreted by the TRAC processor as meaning the
same thing.

2B. FILLING IN HOLES.

Another thing the CALL command in TRAC Language
does is fill in holes that exist In (orms. Let us represent
a hole as follows;

[ I

Now suppose there is a TRAC form with a hole in it, Uke
this.

S 0 RD -N« [tJ

Additional arguments in the call get plugged into holes In
the form . Examples:

call result

•(CL, WORD) HT

• (CL, WORD, 0) HOT

•{WORD, A) HAT

•(WORD, OO) HOOT

Now, a form can have a number of different holes.
Let us denote these by

|1][2)(3| |4j ...

Now suppose we have a form

which we might call numerous ways:

call result

• (WORD, W,1,E) WHITE

• (WORD, ,0O, OWL) HOOTOWL

(Note that putting nothing between two
commas made nothing the argument.)
•(WORD, *(WORD, ,OS.O) HOTSHOT

Perhaps you can think of other examples.

This fill-in technique is obviously useful for program¬
ming. [f a form contains a program, its holes can be made
to accept varying numbers, form names, text strings,
other programs. Example: Suppose we want to create a
new TRAC command, ADD, that adds three numbers instead
of just two. Fair enough:

*(AO,[2],[3]))|

and there you are.

This brings up another example of how nicely TRAC
Language works out. Suppose you have the following In
forms storage:

4ZIPJij,(4)]

•( ZAP, ( 1), [2])]

Try acting this one out with pencil and paper. Suppose you
type In

• (Z0W1E, 5,7)

It happens that the arguments 5 and 7 will be passed neatly
from ZOWIE to ZIP to ZAP to the final execution of the AD;
all through the smooth plugging of holes by the Implicit call
and the Magic Scan procedure of the TRAC processor.

...

TMC Language is a so-called "list processing language" or
"List Language." This Cera has aae to soon any longuaga
for twiddling data having arbitrary and changing fora.

TWo other prowlnant languages of this type are SWOBOL and
LISP (see p. Jl>.

55555

List languages

illy freaky.

tHE SLUFIHCr 6l*Nr

A mild-mannered man in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
who owns his own very small business, is the creator of one
of the most extraordinary and powerful computer languages
there is, though lots of people in the field don’t realize it.
The language is fairly well-known among professionals, but
its real power is hardly suspected.

If BASIC is a fairly conventional programming language,
strongly resembling FORTRAN, TRAC (Text Reckoning and
Compiling) Language is fairly unusual.

The name of it is "TRAC Language , " not just TRAC —
because it’s a registered brand name (like Kleenex Tissues ).
Within the rules, the word "TRAC" is an adjective and not a
noun. Thus TRAC is its first name, Language is its last; so
we can refer to "TRAC Language" instead of having to
precede it with the .

It is included here for several reasons.

1) It is extremely easy to learn, at least for beginners .
Experienced programmers often have trouble with it.

2) It is extremely powerful for non-numeric tasks. In
fact, it is ideal for building your own personal language.

3) It offers perhaps the best control of mass storage,
and your own style of input-output, of any language.

4) It is superbly documented and explained with the new
"The Beginner's Manual for TRAC Language)’ which is now
available.

5) It is likely to catch on one of these days. (Some
large corporations have been investigating it extensively.)

It is not so much the basic idea
of TRAC Language, but the neatness
with which the idea has been elaborated,
that is so nice.

As a side point, here is an
important motto for thinking in general
about computers (and about other things
in general):

MAKING THINGS FIT TOGETHER WELL

TAKES A LOT OF WORK AND THOUGHT.

Let Calvin Mooers 1 TRAC Language be a
shining example.

TRAC Language is great for creating highly interactive
systems for special purposes, including turnkey systems for
inexperienced users and "good-guy" systems. It combines
this with good facilities for handling text, and what is needed
along with that, terrific control over mass storage. It is
also excellent for simulating complex on-off systems; rumor
has It that TRAC Language was used for simulating a major
computer before it was built.

Against these advantages we must balance TRAC
Language's less fortunate characteristics. For numerical
operations it is extremely slow, if not terrible, compared to
the most popular languages. The same applies to handling
numerical arrays and controlling loops, which are compara¬
tively awkward in TRAC Language.

Finally, many programmers are incensed by the
number of parentheses that turn up in TRAC programs; in
this it resembles the language LISP. But this is an aesthetic
judgement.

The TRAC Language has been thought out in great
detail for total compatibility of all parts. (Moreover, by
standardizing the language exactly, Mooers heroically
assures that programs can be moved from computer to
computer without difficulty.)

* TRAC is a registered service mark of Rockford Research,
Inc. Description of TRAC Language primitives adapted by
permission from "TRAC, A Procedure-Describing Language
for the Reactive Typewriter", copyright © 1966 by Rockford
Research, Lnc.

I am grateful to C.A.R. Kagan, of Western Electric
Engineering Research Center, for his extensive
(and finally successful) efforts to interest me in
TRAC Language.

In the well-thought-out ramifications of its basic concept,
the TRAC Language is so elegant as to constitute a work of
art. It beautifully fulfills this rule:

. . the facilities provided by the language should be
constructed from as few basic ideas as possible, and
... these should be general-purpose and interrelated
in the language in a way which avoided special cases
wherever possible.” (Harrison, Data-Structures and
Programming, pub. Scott, Foresman, p. 251.)

The fundamental idea of TRAC Language, which has
been worked out in detail with the deepest care, thought and
consistency, is this:

ALL IS TEXT.

That is, all programs and data are stored as strings of
characters, in the same manner. They are labelled, stored,
retrieved, and otherwise treated in the same way, as
strings of text characters.

Data and programs are not kept in binary form, but
remain stored in character form, much the way they were
originally put in. The programs are examined for execution
as text strings, and they call data in the form of text strings.

This gives rise to certain interesting kinds of
compatibility.

a) Complete compatibility exists in the command
structure: the results of one command can become another
command or can become data for another command.

ALMOST NOTHING CREATES AN ERROR CONDITION.

If enough information is not supplied to execute a command,
the command is ignored. If too much information is supplied,
the extra is ignored.

b) Complete compatibility exists in the data: letters and
numbers and spaces may be freely intermixed. Special
terminal characters (like carriage returns and backspaces)
are handled just like other characters, giving the program¬
mer complete control of the arrangement of output on the
page.

c) Complete compatibility also exists from one computer
to another, so that work on one computer can be moved to
another with ease. By the trademark TRAC, Mooers
guarantees it — an innovation.

COMMAND FORMAT

A TRAC command has the following form. The cross-
hatch or sharp-sign is the way this language identifies a
command's beginning.

#(NM, arg2, arg3, arg4,..)

NM is the name of any TRAC command. It counts as the
first "argument, ” or piece of information supplied. Arg2,
arg3, etc. are whatever else the command needs to know to
be carried out.

We will look first at examples that use the arithmetic
commands of TRAC Language, not because it is particularly
good at arithmetic, which it isn’t, but because they're the
simplest commands. The arithmetic commands are AD
(add), SU (subtract, ML (multiply), DV (divide). Each
arithmetic command takes three arguments, the command
name and two numbers. Examples:

#(AD, 1,2)

is a command to add the numbers 1 and 2.

#(SU, 4,3)

is a command to subtract the number 3 from the number 4.
#(ML,632, 521)

is a command to multiply 632 by 521.

#(DV, 100,10)

is a command to divide 100 by 10.

Now comes the Interesting part.

The way TRAC commands may be combined provides
the language's extraordinary power. This is based on the
way that the TRAC processor examines the program, which
is a string of character codes. Watch as we combine two
AD instructions:

#(AD,3,#(AD, 2,5))

The answer is 10. Miraculous !

How can this be?

^ A comma ends an argument

in the TRAC language?
Ah, that all arguments

could be ended so easily.
--My grandfather.

PRINT "HOW OLD ARE YOU"

INPUT A
LET B = A/40.0

PRINT "YOUR AGE IS" . B. "TIMES THE AGE
OF THE EMPIRE STATE BUILDING."

END

This will cause the following lo happen:

Program type*:

HOW OLD ARE YOU? 20

ns—

Program types:

YOUR AGE IS .5 TIMES THE AGE OF THE EMPIRE
STATE BUILDING.

The IF command

The IF command is a way of testing what's stored
In a variable. Example:

88 IF M = 40 then 63

This tesla variable M to see if it contains the number 40.

If M is indeed 40, the program follower jumps to line 63.

If not. it goes right on and takes the next higher instruction
after 88. The IF can test other relations than equality.
Including "less that." "greater than," "not equal," "less
than or equal to." etc. For instance,

89 IF Q 7 then 102

will send the program follower to command 75 if variable
Q contains a number less than 7. {Note that different BASICa
for different computers may have slightly different rules
here.)

The BASIC language, developed at Dartmouth, must not be
confused with the underlying binary languages of individual
computers (see "Rock Bottom," p.3Z). These underlying
codes sre called "machine languages” (or, in a dressed-up
form, easier to use for programmers, "assembler language").
These are the basic languages, different for each machine.
Dartmouth BASIC, or jut plain Basic, is a widely available,
standardized, simple beginner's language.

ANOTHER PROFOUND EXEMPLARY PROGRAM

r - - - 62

; 63

*—-* 74
75

The program will start typing thusly:

25 BOTTLES OF BEER IN THE WALL
24 BOTTLES OF BEER IN THE WALL

and so on. until Z has reached 0; then it will type

0 BOTTLES OF BEER IN THE WALL
TIME TO GO HOME .

and then it will stop.

You will note that this program, like the one that
printed "HELP. 1 AM CAUGHT IN A LOOP." has a loop,
that ia, a repeated sequence of operations. The first one
was an endless loop, which repeated forever. This loop,
however, is more well-behaved (by some people's standards),
In that it allows an escape when a certain criterion has
been reached- - in this case, printing a line of text 25 times
with variants.

The reason we are able to escape from this loop is
that we have a test instruction, IF statement number 62.

It ia very important for the programmer to Include
testa which allow the program to get out of a loop. This
may be couched as a motto, viz.:

LEAK BEFORE YOU LOOP.

LET Z = 25

PRINT Z. " BOTTLES OF BEER IN THE WALL"
LET Z = Z - 1
IF Z = 0 GOTO 74

GOTO 10 - . . . .—-

PRINT "TIME TO GO HOME ."

END

AN AUTOMATIC LOOP

Indeed, for people who are big on program loops,

BASIC provide# a pair of instructions which handle the
program loop completely. These are the FOR and NEXT
instructions. Wc won't show them here, but they're not
very hard. Using the FOR command , you can easily direct
the computer to do something a million and one times, say.
This can be exhilarating. You can even direct it lo include
that program in something to be done a billion timea, resulting
in a program loop that would be carried out over a trillion
times. All In a abort program! But of course this ia juat
power on paper: we want our program# lo be useful, and
rinlah their Job# in the present century, and ao such flight*
are juat mental exercise#.

FAST ANSWERBACK WITH BASIC (in some version#)

If you want a fast answer to a numerical question,
you can do It without the line number#. typing in

PRINT 3.1416*7124

will cause BASIC to print the answer right out and forget
the whole thing.

TEXT STRINOS IN BASIC

The deluxe veralona of the Dartmouth BASIC
language have operation# for handling lext--
or what computerfolk call "string#," that is.
strings of alphabetic characters and punctuation.
Theae operation# tend lo begin with $ (standing
for "Itrlng"?) and there's no room for them here.

But what they mean is that BASIC can type
letter#, count the noun# In Gone With The Wind ,
or print out the nine hundred million name# of
God.

THIS IS A SERIOUS LANGUAGE,

AND CAN SAVE SOME COMPANIES A LOT OF MONEY

BASIC 1# a very serious language. Advanced versions
of BASIC have Instructions that allow users to put in alphabetical
Information. and store and retrieve all kind# of Information
from disks or tape. In other words, BASIC can be used
for the fairly Bimple programming of a vast range of problems
and "good-guy syatems" mentioned elsewhere. Complete
BASIC systems allowing complex calculations can be had
for perhaps $3000: a general-purpose computer running
BASIC with cassette or other mass storage, for business
or other purposes, can now be had for some $6000. Allowing
a few thousand dollars for programming specific applications
in BASIC, simple systems can be created for a variety
of purposes that some companies might say you needed
a hundred-thousand-dollar system for.

This is serious business. Languages like BASIC
must be considered by people who wont simple syatems
to do understandable things in direct ways that are meaningful
to them, and that don’t disrupt their companies or their
lives.

This has been a very hasty and brief presentation
in which I have tried to convey the feeling of this important
language. If you have the chance to learn it. by all means
do.

SOME FUN THINGS TO TRY IN BASIC

Write a program that prints calendars.

Write a program that converts an input number to
Roman Numerals.

Write a dialogue system that welcomes the user to
the sanitarium, asks him questions, ignores the answers
and insults him. (Use the INPUT statement for receiving
numerical answers. Since the answers are ignored they
can all be stored in one variable.)

WHERE TO GET IT

(Features of the BASIC language vary considerably
from system to system. Which ones offer the highly desirable
alphabetic commands and mass storage have to be checked
out individually.)

BASIC is offered on many if not most time sharing services,
so you can use it from your home on a terminal. (But note that
lhi9 can be expensive and even dangerous, if you’re paying
yourself; there arc not presently adequate cost safeguards lo
prevent you from running up huge bills.)

BEST BUY? Rumors persist of a time-sharing service
somewhere thBt offers BASIC for $S an hour, total, with disk
storage thrown in. I have not been able to verify this.

DEC offers minicomputer-based systems which time-
share BASIC among several terminals simultaneously. (But
you have to buy the whole big system .) The ones that
run on the PDP-8 are marketed mainly to schools, and for
this reason are called, somewhat peculiarly. EDUSYSTEMS
Their multiterminal system for the PDP-11 is called RSTS
(pronounced "Risstias,") and is marketed mainly to businesses.

Hewlett-Packard offers BASIC, 1 believe, on all of
its minicomputers. Of special interest is an odd computer
called the Series 9800 Model 30. You’re only allowed to
program in BASIC. Ofs actually a microprocessor; see

p.ii>

Many other minicomputer manufacturers now offer
BASIC . Data General's NOVA is one.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kemeny and Kurtz, BASIC Programming . Wiley, 1967.

DEC'a Edusystem Handbook is a very nice introduction
to BASIC, quite pleasant end whimsical; it may be
a good introduction even if you're using other people's
BASIC systems. It's $5 from DEC, Communications
Services, Parker St., Maynard, M#ss. 01754.

There is also a programmed text on BASIC by Albrecht
(published by Wiley). For those of ua who freeze
at numerical-looking manuals, programmed texts
can take away a lot of anxiety .

MY COMPUTER LIKES ME (when I speak in BASIC ).

This book has evidently been pul together by the People's
Computer Company . and has some idealistic fervor behind it.
$1.19 from Dymax, Box 310. Menlo Park, Cal. 94025.

AtWS,

(available in BASIC , APL and many other languages)

Arrays are Information setups with numbered
positions. The positions can contain #11 sorts of
different things, however: numbers, letters or
other data, depending on the data structures
allowed in the language.

f *z 5 9 r

• --

rrn

T*&e-J>IK*MnDAlH WXAY

A one-dimensional array is like a row , a two-
dimensional array is like a tabletop, a three-
dimensional array is like a box. and for more
dimensions you can’t visualize.

Arrays are handy for working with a lot of
different things one at a time. They can be given
names just like variables.

Suppose you have a one-dimensional array
named SAM. Then in a program you can usually
ssk for the third element in SAM by referring to
SAM (3). Better than that; you can refer by turns
to every element of SAM by using a counting
variable and changing its value. SAM (JOE) can be
any one of the elements of the array, if we set the
value of JOE. the counting variable, to the number
of the position we want to point to.

For arrays having more than one dimension,
the principle is the same. You may refer in a
program to any space in the array by giving a
number in parentheses, or subscript, specifying
the space's position in each dimension. Suppose
you have an array named PRICES, which gives
the prices of, ssy, various sizes and brands of
TV sets.

-217

„_

Mfr. Mfr. Mfr. Mfr Mfr.

This is PRICES(3,2)

because it's the item in row 3, column 2

9" diag.
12"

15"

19"

^ 'fs

BASIC is a good example of an "algebraic" type of
language, that ia. one formulated more or
less to look like high-school algebra and
permit easy convoraton of certain algebraic
formula# into actual runnable programs.

The most widoly-u#ed language of this type is
FORTRAN (see p.31 ). Thus BASIC i*
often referred to as a "Fortran-type language "

The kickeroo-- and if you understand this it's half

the battle - Is that a line of BASIC or FORTRAN
direct# a certain event to take place, while
■ statement In algebra juat describe# relation#.

The strange resemblance between the descriptive
language (algebra) and the prescriptive
language (Fortran or Basic) i* that algebraic
operation# (which are just recombination#
and restatement#) can be mimicked by the
computer language, and ibis e#rly ob#e##lon
of mathy computerfolk led to making the
computer language look like a descriptive
algebra. Especially with the weird u#e of
the equals-sign to mean "is replaced now by."
In hindsight this wa# a ridiculous idea;
some of the more recent languages (Such a#
APL) ua* a left-pointing arrow instead of an
equala-algn, showing that an action t* being
called for, rather than a relationship being
described.

Suppose you have a two-dimensional array
giving the telephone numbers, salaries and ages
of several different employee# of ■ company. You
have decided to call the array WHAM.

Tel.no. [

Salary /

Age [

You can refer to any single entry in this array a#
WHAM UR V , JOE), where IRV and JOE are two
counting variable* you've decided to set up.

If you set IRV and JOE both to 1.

WHAM (IRV .JOE) is really WHAM(l.l). which
refers you to the telephone number of employee A.
If you change JOE to 2, that give# you WHAM (1.1).
giving you B'. phone; while WHAM(2.1) would be
A'e salary'

Theae are just the mechanics. What you
choose to do with this sort of thing t# your own

affair. Counting around in array# (and core
memory, where they're atored) 1* called Indexing-

If you write the program.

Y*> 0 * Fltsr tOKFUTCR UN6UMC:
PMITaovtM‘5

The BASIC language, also called Dartmouth-Basic,
was Introduced in the sixties at Dartmouth College by John
Ketneny and Thomas Kurtz. It was intended to be a simple
and easy-to-learn introduction to computer programming,
yet powerful enough to do useful things. It has grown in
use , in recent years, both as the foremost beginner's language,
and as a perfectly fine language for doing many simple
Kinds of work— like custom business applications, statistics,
and "good-guy" systems for noi. 2 users as discussed elsewhere
in this book.

Kemeny is now president of Dartmouth, and Kurtz
runs their high-power time-sharing computer center, so
BASIC has a permanent home base there.

Note that the name BASIC does not refer to the bottom-
level or elemental languages of computers. BASIC has
been contrived specifically to make programming quicker
and easier. It iB not "basic" to all computers; such bottom
languages are called "machine language" or "assembler
language" (see pp.

The simplicity of the language begins at the program
input, or editing, level. Each command of BASIC must
be on a separate line, and each line must have a separate
line number. Suppose you accidentally type in

50 IMPUGN Y

when you meant "INPUT" instead of "IMPUGN." You may
replace that command at any time by typing the same line
number and the new version of the line,

50 INPUT Y

which automatically replaces the previously line 50. If
you went to get rid of the line entirely, you type

When you type In a program, the BASIC processor
will do certain things to it (actually cook it down) and store
it in core memory:

Every time you change one of the lines of the program the
BASIC processor will insert, delete or replace lines as
you have commanded, then rearrange whatever'a left accordingly.
In order of the line numbers.

Then when you tell the processor to start the program,
by typing (with no line number)

RUN

The END command

The END command in BASIC simply consists of the
word END. It must come last in the program . Therefore
It must have the highest line number. Example;

90 END

The PRINT command

Whenever the program follower geta to a PRINT command.
it prints out on the terminal whatever la specified. Example;

97 PRINT "HAIL CAESAR . BIRD THOU NEVER WERT"

When and if the program follower geta to this command,
the terminal will print out

HAIL CAESAR. BIRD THOU NEVER WERT

The GOTO commend (pronounced "Go 2")

The GOTO command tells the program follower the
number of the next command for it to do, from which It
will go on. Example:

62 GOTO 99

the processor will start the program going at the command
with the earliest line number, and your instructions will
be executed according to the rules of BASIC.

which means that when a program follower gets to command
#62, it must next Jump to 99 and go on from there, unless
that happens to be the END statement.

Now we will consider some of the commands (or statements)
of BASIC.

——

A SIMPLE SAMPLE PROGRAM

These are enough commands to write a sample program.

43 PRINT "HELP , I AM CAUGHT IN A LOOP"

67 GOTO 43

68 END

The program will start at the first instruction, which
happens in this case to be instruction number 43. That
one prims a message. The next command, by line number,
is 67. This tells the program follower to go back to 43,
which it does.

GOTO

END

"HELP, I AM CAUGHT IN A LOOP"
43-

These two boys had never seen a computer before,
but 1 loaded it up with the BASIC language processor,
showed them a few basic commands and told them to
turn it off when they were through.

1 got back ten hours later and they were still at it.

Too bad kids hove such short attention spans.

■\—v

VARIABLES

The result is that your terminal will print

HELP, I AM CAUGHT IN A LOOP
HELP, I AM CAUGHT IN A LOOP
HELP , I AM CAUGHT IN A LOOP

Interminably. or until you do something drastic. It never
gets to the END statement. (Two strategies for doing something
drastic ere usually to hold down the CONTROL button and
type C, or hold down both CONTROL and SHIFT buttons,
if you have them, and type P. One of these usually works.)

and an end-of-line code, and the whole line is gone.
Example of a BASIC command:

153 LET X = Y

You can choose any line number* you want, but the lines
are automatically put in the order of their numbers. Since
when you write a program you don't usually know at the
outBet what it will look like later, you try to leave enough
gaps in the numbers at the start to fit in the instructions
you might want to put between them later.

The BASIC language, like a number of other languages,
allows you to set aside places in core memory and give
them names. These places may hold numbers. They can
be used to count the number of times that things are done
(or not done), to hold answers, numbers to test against,
numbers to multiply by and so on.

In BASIC, these places are given names of one alphabeti¬
cal letter. That means you can have up to 26 of them.
Examples;

A E 1 O U sometimes Y even X

THE SETTING

To begin with, there must be a computer, and it
muat have a processor for the BASIC language, that is,
a program for carrying out the operations of Dartmouth-
BAS1C. We will assume that thl* BASIC processor la all
set up in core memory ready to go.

(Note; Thla is how it looks ■
in a minicomputer. On
a time-sharing system there’s
a lot of irrelevant other
stuff going on. which we’ll
leave out.)

Because theBe named spaces in memory may be used
something like the way letters are used in algebra, we
call them variables . In fact. each one is s place with a
name.

(—0

AcT«* l V*

151 1052 -LiW.)

If you uee the names B ,C and D for variables in your
program, the BASIC processor will automatically set up
places for them to be stored.

And we will assume. as previously mentioned, that you
have some Idnd of a terminal-- that ia, a device with a keyboard,
some kind of place the computer can send messages to you
and vice versa , and is more or less standard.

Now then: all that is needed is for you to understand
the BASIC language, and you can program this computer
within the confines of BASIC.

it is one of the strange aspects of this field that
languages can be taught independently of discussions of
the machine itself.

The LET command

The LET command puts something into a variable.
Example:

43 LET R= 2.3

What is on the right side of the equals sign in the last statement,
in this case 2.3, is Btuffed into whatever location of core
memory is designated on the left side, in this case a place
known to you only as R. With the result that someplace
in core memory ia ___

The LET statement ia an example of an assignment statement,
which most computer languages have; an assignment statement
assigns a specific piece of information (often a number,
but often other things) to some name (often standing for
a particular place in core memory).

The LET command in BASIC can also be used to do
arithmetic. Example:

14 LET M = 2.3 + (12*7999.1)

(The asterisk has to be used for multiplication because
traditionally terminals don’t have a times-sign.) BASIC
will work this out from right to left and store the result
in M.

The INPUT command

The INPUT statement asks the person at the terminal
for a number and then shoves it into a variable. Example:

41 INPUT Z

which causes the terminal to type a question mark, and
wait. When the user has typed in a number followed by
a carriage return, the BASIC processor stuff* the number
into the variable and proceeds with the program. Here
ia a program using the INPUT statement.

art what make computer* go 'round.

H your computer only did one thing,
then to start It you’d only need one button to

If your computer only did two doien
things, without variations, then you could
let each operation be started by pressing
one of the keys of the terminal, and that
would be that.

But that's not what it'a about.

We have lota of different things that we
want computer a to do, and we want one com¬
mand to work on different varieties of dats. or
on the resulta of a previous command, or even
to chew on another command itself; and so a
computer language is a contrived method of
giving commands to a computer that allows
the commands to be entwined in a complex fashion .

This means having rules the computer can
carry out and the person can remember.

Thia means having basic operations that
can be built into bigger operations (routines,
subroutines, subprograms. programs).

Thus a computer language is really
a method by which a user can tie these
programs together. Computer languages
are built according to contrived sets of
rules for tying programs together. Such
rules are limited only by the imagina¬
tion of their contrivers. Each computer
language has its own contrived system of
rules, and it may be completely different
from the contrived rules tying together
any other computer language. (That's one
reason for here presenting three differ¬
ent computer languages, to show some of
the mad variety that can exist.)

Computer languages tend to look like
nothing else you've ever seen. Thus com¬
puter programs, which of course have to
be written in these computer languages,
look pretty weird. Some programs look
like old train schedules (in multiple
columns). Some look a little like prin¬
ted poetry. In any case, a COMPUTER PRO¬
GRAM NO MORE LOOKS LIKE ITS RESULT THAN
THAN THE WORD "COW" LOOKS LIKE A COW.

One of the central concepts of this
book is that of a' "program follower," a
dynamic entity which somehow follows a
program. Well, EVERY LANGUAGE HAS A PRO¬
GRAM FOLLOWER FOLLOWING ITS OWN PARTI¬
CULAR RULES. These rules are contrived
for convenience, suitability to a purpose,
and "aesthetics" of a sort-- often some
form of stark compression. (The program
followers wired into computers are some
what more akin to one another; see "Rock
Bottom," p. 32.) About all we can say
languages have in common is: EVERY COM¬
PUTER LANGUAGE ALLOWS LOOPS, TESTS AND
BRANCHES, AND COMMUNICATION WITH EXTERNAL
DEVICES, as mentioned on p. 11. Beyond
that the differences are incredible.

ThI^cId
f OK Voor

Everyone should hove some brush with
computer programming, just to see what it in
and isn't. What H is: casting mystical spells
in arcane terminology , whose exact details
have exact ramifications. What it i sn't : talking
or typing to the computer in some way that re¬
quires intelligence by the machine What d is:
an intricate technical art. What d isn't : science.

Why three languages ’! Because one would
look too much alike. Only by perusing several
do you get any sense of the variety they take.

These three languages make it possible
in principle for you to learn computers
with no coaching. All you need (in princi¬
ple) is your own terminal, and time-sharing
accounts with firms running BASIE (most of
them do), TRAC Language (for availability
see p. 21), and/or API. (for partial list of
sources see p. 25),

Why these three? Several good reasons.

One. they can be used from a terminal , which
means that you could in principle get a terminal
in your home and play with the computer from
over the telephone. But this is expensive,
and at worst fraught with accidental financial
liabilities, so the possibility is minor right now.
Nevertheless, it should be practical and inex¬
pensive fairly soon.

These languages have been chosen be¬
cause they arc important, very different
from each other very powerful, influential
and highly regarded in the field, interac¬
tive from tine-sharing systems, arid very
suitable for making interactive programs
and "good-guy systems."

Each may be used to create programs
for science, business or recreation.*

Because Che-:,
from a terminal,
we night call i■

can be used
trued quickly,
..'tguages.

Note: inter i 1 ; inges mean vou,

the programmer, can change your progran
from the terminal; interactive programs
are those which interact with users, which
is different. However, these languages arc
quite suitable for both.

Another reason for these three: they
represent, in a way. several major types.

BASIC is a widespread and fairly standard
language- that is, it i s available on computers
everywhere. Moreover, it looks rather like
Fortran, which is the most important “scientific"
computer language.

TRAC Language, though well-known among
researchers, has mighty powers that are not so
well known. Moreover, it achieves its powers
through the simple and highly consistent following
of a few simple principles. and is thus both very
easy to learn and an elegant intellectual triumph
for its inventor.

Moreover, it is a so-called "list language,”
meaning that it can handle information having
extremely varied and changing form-- a very
important feature to those of us interested in
computer applications like picture-making and
text handling, which use amorphous and busy
types of dota. (See "Data Structures." pp_2G )

APL is another elegant language, also
worked out handsomely from certain basic ideas
by a very thoughtful and inspired inventor.

In the contemplation of these three lan¬
guages you may begin to see the influence of
the individual human mind in the computer field,
quite contrary to the stereotype. I would like
to stress here that each of these three languages
represents somebody's individual personal ach¬
ievement. and ia in turn a foundation upon
which others, writing programs, can build

Two of these language* n-.-rni:
creation of interactive -
on a line-by-line basi ■: ;

Language (pp. 18-21) p._.-
of systems that react :
user types in, rather th-u. •„ i,:- m
carriage return at the end of a ii
permits you to program user-level
that are even more responsive.

• work
TRAC
’ i on
■ the
• or the
ine. This

IF YOU'RE SCARED. Don't worry, it's
not a test. Flip the pages and look at the exam¬
ples. (In particular, you might look for the
same program which appears in each language:
a program to cause the computer to print
"HELP. I AM TRAPPED IN A LOOP” forever.)

This book is organized so you can look
at it or skip it in any order, so there is no
particular reason you have to fight through
the next three chapters if you went to press on
But if you want to study these languages, by all
means do so.

Languages that can be used from a terminal
tire called on-line languages . There are u num¬
ber of other popular on-line languages: JOSS
(the original). FOCAL. LOGO. SPEAKEASY I'm
just sorry there's no room for them here.

Some popular non-interactive languages
arc briefly described on pp. 30-31.

And you Just ir. ,tuti.

TUI more and nor.- you get the feel of tt.

And find yourself writing programs that

THE BC ST HAY to CEARU.

tHfurot lexT 0>itoes"

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ.

Mom on: nor all your Piely nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel hah a Line,

Nor all your Tear* w«»h out a Word of il.

Khayyan/Pitagefa Id

Numerous interactive programs exist for
editing text at computer terminals-, in other
words, for doing what Magic Typewriters do, but
using a computer instead of a small special-
purpose machine.

Unfortunately most of tiiese systems are
dreadful. Dreadful, that is, for ordinary
human beings. What computer people seem to
think of as appropriate systems for handling
text are totally unsuitable for people who care
and think a lot about text, although they nay
be good for computer programmers.

Such systems allow you to insert text
(with some difficulty), delete (with some dif¬
ficulty), and rearrange (maybe).

Ordinarily the user must learn an explicit
command language, some system of alphabetical
commands that have to be typed In to effect any
change in o ,1. Programmers think this

** ighens the mind.

The text i* uN-i.il l y turcvi .i.i series of
alphabetical and pimctu;it ion codes in the com¬
puter's core memory. The area it occupies in
the core memory is called a core buffer .

The program generally gives the user an im¬
aginary "pointer," a marker specifying what point
in the text the program is currently concerned
wi th.

What is the pointer for ” It specifies where
the operations are to take place. "Insert," for
example. if text is inserted, it will go into
the place presently pointed at.

Many of the commands are concerned witli con¬
trolling the current position of the pointer,
moving it backward or forward by a specific num¬
ber of characters (including punctuation marks
and spaces) or lines (known to the program by the
carriage-return codes interspersed in the text).

behave and

personal quirks oi who ;
Another feature mar-.

Ccf\pUTCy<~2yvie tot syrrei^.

4 ifoi cr *

: , ,A '

o ° ° p J

* c 7 fc ' D i-

-2-L' c t T H f f A *' ' *' ■ *

£MT7£ rJjcK-x

a speci-
, the next

ind prop-
, e with

. .Me

• , • fie forced
u.gouges because
nought processes
, if not make

TWO

You would think the fundamental dichotomy
among computer terminal* was between those that
print on paper and those that show you stuff on
a screen. Butttian’t. (That’s like the difference
between people and whale*-- much greater outside
than inside.)

Actually the fundamental distinction between
terminals is between ASCII (pronounced "Askey")
and IBM terminals. ASCII Is a code and scheme
of organisation which was adopted by "the indus¬
try under the blessing of the National Bureau
of Standards. But IBM has pointedly Ignored this
standard.

The principal terminal of the ASCII type.

In aheer numbers, is the model 33-ASR Teletype
(trademark of Teletype Corp.). ao this kind of
terminal Is called the "33 ASR type." or "Teletype-
type," or wc even say a given terminal "looks
to the computer like a Teletype."

$*Me l&WNACJ

'foo wWU'ite,

All are ASCII-type unless otherwise noted.
Note: there sre hundreds of types and
brands of terminals available. These are just
some thought*.

PRINTING TERMINALS.

BEST BUY? The model 36 ASR Teletype
gives you upper and lower case, and is otherwise
similar to the standard model 33. $70 a month from
RCA Service Company, Data Communications Dlv.
(offices in major cities); $15/mo. for the coupler.
30-day cancellable but coat* $50 to put in, $24 to
take out.

There Is a cute terminal that behaves just
like the 33 ASR, but is faster and use* NCR
pressure paper or a ribbon, interchangeably.

The Extel Series A teleprinter from Extel Corp. .

310 Anthony Trail, Northbrook, Ill. 60062.

If you like Seledrics, but want lo go to ASCII,
there is one weird possibility.

-fc* £Hlr -w-ti

IBM, however, seems to Uke changing its
systems around a lot, for instance changing its
codes when it brings out a new computer. (For¬
tunately, it just happens that they also sell adap¬
ters between them. Whew.) So IBM-type terminals
arc different by design.

There is one main type, however, exem¬
plified by the IBM model 2741 terminal. Thus we
say a terminal is an "IBM-type" or ”2741-type"
terminal.

A firm called Tycom Systems Corporation
(26 Just Road, Fairfield NY 07006) offers an
interesting alternative. It happens that all Selec-
trics (anyway, Model I and Model II) have a seam
around the midriff at which the typewriter can
be unscrewed into two sections. Clever Tycom!
They make a device which fits between , looks lo
the bottom like the top of the Selectric, and looks
to the top like the bottom. Also, it turns the
Selcctrie into a terminal, receiving ASCII codes
from whatever computer you attach it to and
causing the computer to type them, or sending out
what you type to the computer in ASCII.

Curiously, IBM has given its blessing to
this arrangement, meaning you can have this
ssndwich deal done to a Selectric you rent from
IBM , and serviced under beefed-up IBM mainten¬
ance agreements ($72 per year, or $16.50 per hour,
as of 1970).

DISPLAY TERMINALS (sec p;>. DM 20-1)
There nrc nany brands. None use video.

Both Teletype- and IBM-type terminals
come in either video-screen or printing models,
from a variety of manufacturers.

Indeed, even the Selectric (IBM trademarly,
3M p typing mechanism appears in some
Teletype-type terminals.

There is a very important performance
difference between ASCII and IBM terminals.

The ASCII terminal can send each character typed
by the user - each "keystroke"-- to the computer
immediately. This means that highly responsive
programs can be written, which examine the user’s
input and can reply instantaneously, if need be,
after anything the UBer types.

IBM-type terminals, however, require a
"line feed" character or an "end of transmission"
character to be typed by the user to make it the
computer's turn . This locks the keyboard so the
person can't use it. Then the computer must type
something, ending with its own "unlock" signal
that makes it the person's turn again

Why thia unwieldy deaign? Supposedly it
results from the curious decision, in the design
of IBM's 360 computer, to make all devices
resemble the card reader as far as the computer
U concerned. Just as the card reader reads
punched cards till the last one ia done, the IBM
terminal is designed to send and receive characters
until a "finished" condition is reached.

The earlier video terminals came with
dreadful styling, like a 1940s science-fiction
movie. But as an example of how the market is
developing, one of the handsomest video terminals
is the $1300 Mini-Tec from TEC Incorporated.

9800 North Oracle Road, Tucson, Ariz. 65704.

(t comes covered with wood-grain contact paper
and looks very nice. (You should have seen
their early models.)

The Hazeltine 1000 video terminal rents
for $49/mo. on a 1-year contract. LOWER-CASE
OPTION; modem and coupler apparently not
included. (Hazeltine. Greenlawn, NY 11740,
with offices all over.)

if you have no objection to ITT, they offer
a portable video terminal with built-in modem
and coupler, the Asciscope, for $65/month.
Supposedly there's a long waiting list. (ITT
Data Equipment and Systems Division, East Union
Ave.. East Rutherford , NJ 07073.)

see Kustom Electronics, Inc. (aren't they the
rock-amp people?) , Data Communications Division,
1010 West Chestnut, Chanute. Kansas G6720.
They've already set up travelling terminals for
the mobile constabulary of Kansas City (Mo.) ,

Palm Beach and Nashville. (Communications .

Jan. 73, ad p. 47.) Now, of course, you'll need
a whole stationary radio setup to run that...

Y » u i’

MISCELLANEOUS

Various firms rent lermlnals, some on a
short-term basis. (Some terminal companies
are bad news, keeping up their equipment badly
and offering poor service, so watch it.)

(The day will come, let’s hope it's soon,
that you can rent a terminal overnight or for a
weekend like a movie camera. But till people
get a sense of how far and fast things are moving,
we'll continue to schlock along haphazardly.)

Unfortunately rental people are hard to find,
since they are usually local, and the Yellow Pages
idiotically lump together every possible form of
computer sales and service under "Data Processing
Equipment and Supplies,” and few firms further
specify their business in the listing.

PURTHER POOP

if you're serious about keeping up with
developments in the terminal area, you might
want to subscribe to Terminals Review ($28/yr.),
highly spoken of by Datamation . (GML Corp.,

594 Marrott Rd. . Lexington, MA 02173,)

A "CRT Survey” listing characteristics
of HO CRT displays (including both video ter¬
minals snd fancier pictorial displays - see flip
side of this book) is available for ten bucks
postpaid from Datapra Research Corp., One
Corporate Center, Route 38, Moorestown, NJ
08057.

Jtfj-

“Tv

f"*' net (*«■« r *1).

V'> ^ VTOP, -fj.oe.

VIDEO TERMINALS WITHOUT THE VIDEO

Here are some names (neither endorsed nor
criticized):

Computer Planning I Supply, Chicago

TTS Systems, LA

Vardon a Associates, Dallas

A very hot item right now is a terminal
called the "Digi-Log"-- actually several different
models-- available from Digi-Log Systems. Inc.,
666 Davisville Rd., Willow Grove, Ps. 19090.

A good outfit, that rents both ASCII and
IBM-type terminals of their own manufacture, is
Anderson Jacobson Co. (1065 Morse Ave.,
Sunnyvale, Calif. 94086. and major cities). They
have a Selectric terminal, for instance, which
rents for about $100 a month (about the same as
the standard IBM 2741) bul is portable.

This device fits in a briefcase. Basically
it is a keyboard with a socket for the phone,
and an antenna wire. You phone the computer,
drop the phone handset in the slot, and clip the
wire to the antenna of a TV set. Presto! On the
TV set appears what you and the computer type
at each other.

To provide a memory with your ASCII or IBM-
IBM-type terminal, an odd machine called the
Techlran 4100 (about $1000 from Techlran Indus¬
tries, 580 Jefferson Rd. . Rochester, NY 14623) can
be used for offline storage, it uses a magnetic
cassette. Here are some things you can do with it;

type stuff into the Techtran,

later squirt it to n computer at high speed

receive stuff from a computer at high speed,
later type it back automatically on
the terminal

type into the Techtran, correct it, and then
have it typed back automatically--
no computer.

The question of whether the Techtran can be used
with the Digi-Log has not been publicly resolved.

It happens that Anderson Jacobson (above)
will rent you (heir 2741-type Selectric terminal,
with a Techtran. for about $220 a month total.

But they won't rent the Techtran separately.

A 2741-type Selectric terminal with memory,
offering these same capabilities, is now available'
from IBM! It is the Communicating Mag Card
Executive (CMC). Since the Mag Card Executive,
to which they have added the communication
feature, costs over $200 a month, figure the
communication feature could cost another $100
or so monthly, or probably half again as much
as the Anderson-Jacobson.

Honeywell (Honeywell Information Systems,
Wellesley Hills. Mass.) has recently made
available a Braille program to be used with
"standard terminals” in their systems. (This may
be Ihe adaptation developed at MIT to do Braille
on the 33 ASR.)

For those of us literary types who want
upper and lower case but are stuck with 33ASRs,
a LOWER-CASE CONVERSION KIT is available from
Data Terminals and Communications. Campbell,
California.

CVfiJ* •<**!>

ti < . COecV.c **u -f

'—‘I- (&•)- L)**h**^)

This is especially good for travelling
salesmen (lo communicate with their offices and
ordering system via time-sharing computer)
and executives who do computer work from the
road. Also for people who want to show off
remote computer systems.

Disadvantage: only 42 characters per line,
which is awkward for some things, such as
programming in Fortran.

Price: $1200 to $1400. They also lease, at
rates as low as $40/month (3 years).

No lower-case as yet.

Also available on rental, supposedly, from
Westwood Associates. Inc. , 50 Washington Terrace,
East Orange, NJ 07017.

Ann Arbor Terminals. Inc. (Ann Arbor,
Mich.?) is said to offer a similar unit that is
very nice.

The equivalent IBM-type terminal-- keyboard,
coupler and clip to the TV-- is the IPSA-100.
offered by i.P. Sharp Associates, Inc. (Bridge
Administration Building, Bridge Plaza, Ogdensburg.
NY 13669). Unfortunately it's much larger than
the Digi-Log-- it comes in a medium-size suitcase
— and more expensive ($1700 up). However,
they offer the APL character-set (see APL under
"Magic Languages,” p-2.2) 1,8 an option-- even
a model with both norma) and APL character-sets
as a switch-selectable option (costs even more).

Recently , of all things, plans for a do-it-
yourself unit of this type were announced in a
popular electronics magazine (Don Lancaster,

"TV Typewriter," Radio-Electronics . Sept. 1973,
43-52). This does not include the full plans,
which are available for $2 from TV TYPEWRITER,
Radio-Electronics. 45 E. 17th St.. New York.

NY 10003.

Supposedly this can be built for "around
$120"-- probably a deal more - if you are a skilled
electronics builder or technician. But that looks
to include a great deal of tabor.

The finished unit holds up to 32 characters
per line and up to 16 lines on the screen; a second
memory can be added, to hold a second alternative
screenful.

Upper case only.

TYPE RIGHTER-.

The JUgic T^joevrriUiw

A number of different systems are coi.iiiv
on the market to aid you in error-free typing,

IBM would have you call these "word pro¬
cessing systems," since that makes them sound
of-a-piece with their dictation equipment. Ac¬
tually they're text regurgitation systems, but
let's just call then Magic Typewriters.

Prices of these things tend to run between
$100 and $250 a month.

Generally these are being sold as secre¬
tarial aids, partly because they tend to be too
ungainly for use by writers themselves. A
principal use has been in large law offices,
where contracts, wills and such arc stored as
"boilerplate" (standard sections of Document)
and then modi’ ’ i.e lawyer to

justify the

Such sy onsist of

three things :

Unfortunately some of
quite badly thought out, I
I am not sure whether they
are accidentally or on pur;
pretat ion 'i's flattering to

I have had ex tens
of these systems, the
and the 1HM Mug Card 1:
say that i ■ 1 •• i 1

sectiv.
might !.
these

ive experience with two
IBM Mag Tape Selectric
xecutive. Suffice it to
■ t- . t these systems were
1 ■ accident, then the

■ M and its products

■ lant. As it is,

. :.J!■■■: I . of (say I

to their cui.

given little
else. In bott,
ficial plausibi. :: Mu

ises knots into tangled r.i;■;
verge on the preposterous,
was written on a Mag Laid ! •

dunned -.iirry 1 bothered.

A typewriter , connected to some sort of
magnetic memory , such as a tape, coated
card or"disk, and

editing circuitry , which responds to
various acts by the user.

WHAT THEY DO: allow you to type stuff in, which
is both typed on the paper and at the same time
stored on the magnetic whatever. Small errors
you correct as you type along, generally by
backspacing.

terns of this type are:

iii'- : .-.M Mag Tape Select rn (MI/ST ut MT'-T).

Records on sprocketed 16mm
used for movie sound record;,
different tapes to get coni .

Th- "I

plast i • e! • •* wilt,

magnt-i :t!i of , h.i r.ic t r

The IBM M.i :ric composer (tfi/S ,

MTSCj . Product- > ... , : with the SclMe¬
tric Composer, a wi , r ■ . nus

complications well be. i .ipe

Selectric. Even more v '!.jg

Card Executive. Uses ■ , ,.cs

as MTST.

(Note: fur those who l ti¬
the above devices, hut apprec

a c omp u 11 ■

know wh

Typewriter, and seeus t in

a hidden rienory. App t:

A 111 ;n c.llii-d .1.1V in due-> ’

using a Tycom Selectric Sandui
"Printing Terminals," nearby).

Olivetti has one c .<!
cessing .System. Their
they say, ISO pages oi '

Two other outfits ;

.uni tj ti i ntype.

hoops 1 Here come-.

In-.-.. i i: j_ t n’l They have t.

interested in this sort ot thing,
t [national Word Processing Associa-

r, id, AMS Building, Willow Grove,

the book

for more

Xw^cx>vc

Used to be that ordinary people had to
deal with computers by fining out intricate
forms which were then translated into punch
cards! The forms put things in weird cate¬
gories (see "Coded-Down Data," p. U i •)

No longer.

i longer necessary ,
yjterns can now give you i

This is done through the magic of the
TERMINAL. Terminals come in two conspicuous
flavors (typewriter and screen or boob tuoe )
and also have two less-noticeable divisions^
("Teletype" or "industry" versus "IBM type.' )

Anyway,

allows a person and i
other.

Now, computers are merely gadgets for
twiddling information. They no more under¬
stand English, or human psychology, than
puppies can read music. (See Artificial In¬
telligence," p.lt-IS") But the computer's prog¬
ram can, for instance, direct the computer to
type out a simple question, and compare the
user's answer with a simple set of alternatives.
For example, suppose the user is visiting a hos¬
pital. A computer can sign hin in without the
abrasiveness of a receiving nurse, and with far
more patience. The following might be a sample
dialogue. (Here the computer types what s in
caps, and the user*s replies are in lower-case.)

DO YOU HAVE AN ACUTE PAIN? (Y, N, DK)
dk

YOUR ANSWER IS: DK FOR "DON'T KNOW."
DOES THAT MEAN YOU’RE NOT SURE
WHAT 'ACUTE' MEANS? (ANSWER A)

A PAIN COMES AND GOES? {ANSWER B)
YOU HAVE A PAIN SORT OF ON THE
BORDER? (ANSWER C)

IS THIS PAIN IN AN EXACT PLACE YOU
CAN IDENTIFY? (Y,N,DK)

An interactive system of this kind is call-^
ed a conversational system,in that it "converses
Kith the user/ TKe secret is that the alterna¬
tives in the computer program are few and care¬
fully worked out beforehand: there are great pit-
falls when there are too many alternatives, as
when such conversational systems are used for
teaching (sec pp. JiAi )■

Here is a straightforward example: a system
I wish I had for balancing a checkbook. Note
that the inner program for this conversational
system could be written'in any of the three lan¬
guages presented later.

A terminal it simply
any device by which
a person and a computer
can type at each other.

Hide love terminals.
This one it a video
terminal or keyeaope
(see p. DM 104 ). It
allows the computer
to present textual or
numeric information,
play games with you,
quit you for infor¬
mation in a good-guy
system, or whatever
-- depending on the
program, of course.

More expensive scopes
(or computer diop lays )
allow pictorial ani-
mation under the user's
control (discussed
throughout flip side).
THE HATH TUIHC TO
UHDlRSTAHD: what they
do is decided by human

principies." Human
beings take note.

THE NEW FRONTIER IN COMPUTERS IS
CONCEPTUAL SIMPLICITY AND
CLARITY .-

People who delight in intricacy arc going to
have to learn some new tricks. Internal in¬
tricacy is fine, as long as the user doesn't
have to deal with it.

Motto 3 for the new era (to computer
people )s

MAKING THINGS EASY IS HARD.

Motto 4 for the new era:

ANY SYSTEM FOR A SPECIFIC PURPOSE
SHOULD BE TEACHABLE IN TEN
MINUTES OR LESS.

Anyone who has been taught the use of
some fixed-purpose computer system, such as
an airline reservation systen, may doubt this.
But perhaps this book will clarify things
somewhat.

A "COOD-tXY SYSTEM"

computer system that Is
CLEAR,

EASY TO USE,

AMD FRIENDLY.

ANY MAN OF COMMON SENSE CAN
DESIGN A COMPUTER SYSTEM FOR
A PURPOSE IMPORTANT TO HIM:
the data structure, forms of
information, general opera¬
tions, record-keeping, and
responses to on-line users.

But for some reason this is
generally kept a secret.

WHAT PROGRAM WOULD YOU LIKE TO RUN? ckbk
CHECKBOOK PROGRAM STARTS.

DO YOU WANT TO PROOF THE NEW STATEMENT FOR

MARCH? y

PLEASE LIST THE CHECKS THAT HAVE COME IN.

231 , 239 , 240 , 242, 244, 24S.

SUM OF INCOMING CHECKS IS $345.72. DO YOU
WANT BREAKDOWN? n

PRESUMABLY BANK IS CHARGING YOU .60 FOR
SIX CHECKS. ALSO MONTHLY CHARGE OF
FIFTY CENTS (PLEASE CONFIRM), y

ARE THERE ANY OTHER BANK CHARGES THIS
MONTH? n

ARE THE FOLLOWING DEPOSITS ON THIS STATE¬
MENT-- MARCH 1 SALARY, $854,007 y
GIFT FROM AUNT AGATHA, 14 MARCH,

$ 25,00? n

TOTAL ON STATEMENT SHOUIO BE $1753.21.

PLEASE CONFIRM, y

YOUR CURRENT FLOAT IS $656.75. DO YOU KANT
BREAKDOWN? y

CURRENT FLOAT AS FOLLOWS--

NO. 241 IRVING'S RECORDS 7 MARCH $ 6.75

NO. 243 SINISTER 6 MALADROIT (LEGAL

FEES) 12 MARCH $600.00

NO. 246 DOCCIE HAIRDRESSERS

12 MARCH $ 20.00

NO. 247 SAM CRONK (REPAYMENT)

14 MARCH 1 30.00

TOTAL $656.7S

ARE YOU DONE WITH CHECKBOOK PROGRAM? y

(The part shown above is easy. Thinking
out the ways for the user to correct his re¬
cords, and/or the bank, is the tough part.)

COMPANIES THAT WILL SET UP WHOLE
LITTLE BUSINESS SYSTEMS

A number of companies make minicomputers
(partial list on p. 4} ); however, companies
who want business systems built around mini¬
computers may want to investigate companies
that will put together whole business systems
for them around minis.

(It is hoped that one contribution of
this book will be to give the reader a better
idea of what to ask for.)

Types of available
computer terminals
are discueeed in

the next spread ;
more display terminals
discussed p. DM ^0'

Helow: a "bull pen"
of terminals, all
hooked up to the main
computer at the
Chicago Circle Campus,
University of Illinois.
What each person does
at his terminal
is normally independent
of what any other pereon
does, through time ¬
sharing of the main
computer. Installations
more suited to time¬
sharing can have large
numbers of terminals,
all over a campus, a
company or the world;

Two companies that seen to be in this , , 1

:ess are. comsideRAte layout

Genesis One Computer Corporation, i

99 Park Ave., NY 10016. Appears
to use BASIC language (see pp. 16-17).

Qantel Corp. (offices in five major cit¬
ies), Sells a minicomputer of their
own manufacture, using a language
called QIC (Qantel Interactive Code),
which a salesman tells me is "just
like BASIC" (see pp. 16-17). Mini¬
mum setup includes a display terminal,
printer, computer and 6-million-char¬
acter disk, at $31,000. 'v_

'JOE TURKEY USER"

A good friend of mine, Jordan Young,
ia a former R.E.S.I.S.T.O.R. (see p. f7 >
and now a systems programmer (sec p. YJ I
on the mighty Dartmouth tine-sharing sys¬
tem. trrss. (See p. fS\)

Jordan tells »e that one of the more
important people at Dartmouth ia a mythical
individual named Joe Turkey User. Thi# es¬
timable personage knows hardly anything
about computers, makes a lot of mistakes,
thinks he understands what you tell him
when he doesn't, tends to hit the wrong
keys on the terminal, and In genaral tends
to screw up.

But the motto up there is: "If it's
not simple enough for Joe Turkey User—
it's too complicated.“

DTSS is a good-guy system.

YOUR FIRST COMPUTER CONTACT

When you first sit at a computer tsrminal.
the feeling ia one of sheer terror. Swest and
chills, dumpiness and sudden cli»sy nervous
motions, lunstic ebsentmindednesi and stassoering
fear and awkwardness interfere with your ability
to function or understand the person who is
helping you.

THE MOST IMPORTANT COMPUTER TERMS FOR THE '70s

Here are some phrases that will count in the
new era of computing, when we will run into
more and more computer systems set up for
particular purposes.

connected to a functioning computer.

(Note that the computer may be in the
typewriter or desk itself.)

(As distinct from off - tine , setting
things up for processingTater.)
interactive

not just connected, but responding to
you. interactive systems and programs
can respond to your choices and requests,
clarify what they want from you, etc.
remote

referring to something far away, as dis¬
tinct from local . right where you are.

A computer can be either remote or local,
e.g. , on your desk,
front end (n.), front-end ladj.)

whatever stands between you and a system.
A front end can be the terminal in your
office, for example. A front - end program
is one which mediates between a user and
some other system or program, perhaps
collecting data for it by quirting you.
dedicated

set up for only one use. A big computer
at a computing center has to have many
uses; a Little computer in your office
can be dedicated. Dedicated computers
arc now hidden in all sorts of things:
cash registers, for example (see "Micro¬
processors p. L j4 ).
turnkey (adj.)

turned on with a key. Especially,
turnkey systems . small computer systems
that can just be turned on (key or not)
and are fully set up, ready to run,
programmed, etc.

responding to events in the world as nceJed,
without delays. Computer systems that con¬
trol machinery, make airline reservations,
predict the weather or respond to naive users
are real-time. Systems that can catch up
overnight are non-real - line.

intelligent terminal”

stupid term referring to any object that
does more than act like a plain terminal.
The term is stupid because it confuses
distinctions. Some "intelligent terminals’
have extra circuits for various purposes;
others contain their own minicomputers;
still others are ordinary terminals con¬
nected to front-end programs,
ser-oriented

set up for "users"-- people who are not
programmers or input typists, but who
actually need something done,
scr level (n.), user-level (adj.)

"where the user is” mentally; his level
of involvement. User - level system ,
system set up for people who are not
thinking about computers but about the
subject or activity the computer is sup¬
posed to help with,
aive user (n.), naive-user (adj.)

person who doesn’t know about computers
but is going to use the system. Naive-
user systems are those set up to make
tTtfngs eas)T“and clear for such people.

(We are all nuive users at some
time or other; it's nothing to be ashamed
Though some computer people seem to

o being loused up by

think .. -

iot-proof

not susccptib1
naive user.

The hostility in this term may in
some cases be real. Computer people
sometimes forget, or do not wish to tol¬
erate, the degree of confusion that naive
users bring to the keyboard. This atti¬
tude is not just their problem but every
body's, since they lay it on us.
id-guy system .

stand-alone system

system (regardless of
doesn't have to be at
else. (May contain 1

purposel which
tavhed to anything
ts own computer.)

peoplt y Oft. |*TTe '« >* *>jft«r.Tk*- -\nU)

|iO VU6*,<iUf.tr COArulUt TV.

"Modem" takes the terminal's pulse code
and warbles it into the phone as audible
tones. The computer answers with similar
warbles and twaedling; the modem converts
that back into alphabetical characters.

0-S^-

RS-232 is the

CmuriMC.

standard

(21

fr«ei4l
rnwta tVtwf

V |to CVJ HMr h

o*J 4 MiNiCCM| 0 TUt(‘«r IA )
OK 4 bi(r C tmpvree. 0t<. p **)

(t'a awfully eaay to fool people with
simple word*, let alone buffalo them with weird
teChnical-soundlng gab. The thing about tech
talk 1» that It can really be applied to any area.
The trick Uee in the arrangement of boxcar
adjective noune, and in the vague uee of windy
terma that have connotatione in •one particular
technical area - aay. the "pace program.

Juat conaider. He might call a common
or garden apade--

A PERSONALIZED EARTH‘MOVING
EQUIPMENT MODULE

A MINERALOOICAL MINI-TRANSPORT

A PERSONALIZED STRATEGIC TELLURIAN
COMMAND AND CONTROL MODULE

AN AIR-TO-GROUND INTERFACE

CONTOUR ADJUSTMENT PROBE

A LEVERAGED TACTILE-FEEDBACK
GEOMASS DELIVERY SYSTEM

OMfUTeu >wdcj

jo sr cute ickcs

Juat the way everyone can underetand camera#, vlt.t
“a caaiara ta a device you point at aouethinq
to willfully capture Ita appearance.“

Juat the way everyone can undaratand care, via.)

"k car la a device people get lnaide which
then goes aowewhere elae, under the willful
control of the driver.”

Well, how about

*A coaputer la a device which manipulates
Information and external ecceasorlea, accor¬
ding to a plan willfully prepared by a planner.'

IUMTiO^L

HistiiM

FICTIONS ABOUT WHAT COMPUTERS DO

Many people suppose there Is nothing
computers cannot do (see p. <5); some peo¬
ple, indeed, think there is nothing com¬
puters do not already do.

A couple of years ago, a leading
picture magazine carried a piece a-
bout Stanford's Artificial intelli¬
gence Laboratory, claiming that one
"Shakey the Robot" had been developed
to near-hunan intelligence and capa¬
bilities. This was pure bosh, since
repudiated in the computer magazines,
but a lot of people Out There in
Readerland believed it. (See "The
God-Builders," flip side.)

Once I had a long discussion with
a somewhat wild-eyed young woman who
believed that the government was moni¬
toring her brain with computers. 1
think I persuaded her that even If
this were feasible it would cost the
government tens of thousands of dollars
to do it, and that probably no existing
government agency was that interested
in her thoughts. I'm not sure she was
persuaded.

A MAN-MACHINE ENERGY-TO-STRUCTURE
CONVERTER

A ONB-TO-ONE INDIVIDUALIZED

GEOPHYSICAL RESTflUCTURIZBR

A PORTABLE UNITIZED EARTHWORK
SYNTHESIS SYSTEM

AN ENTRENCHING TOOL (Flreslgn Theater)

A ZERO-SUM DIRT LEVEL ADJUSTER

A FEEDBACK-ORIENTED CONTOUR
MANAGEMENT PROBE AND
DIGGING SYSTEM

A GRADIENT DISEQUILIBRATOR

A MASS DISTRIBUTION NEGENTROPRIZER

„ k, 'W-!TllLS'tSWl

AN EXTRA TERRESTRIAL

TRANSPORT MECHANISM.

Spades, not words, should be used for
shovelling. But words should help ua unearth
the truth.

In the computer field, the same things arc
often celled by different names (for Instance,
the IBM 1800, a fairly ordinary minicomputer,

Is called by them the "IBM 1800 Data Acquisition
and Control System”), different things are often
called by the same names, end things can be
inside-out and upside-down versions of each
other in extraordinary variety. (Indeed, compu¬
ter people may find this book lnalde-out, which
is okay with me. Life is a Klein bottle.)

Sorting things out. then, means having a
few basic concepts clear In your mind, and
knowing when you see examples and variations
of them.

Computer people often soy that to understand
computers you have to have a * logical mind .*

There’s no such thing. But faying iu oh things
intimidate* many, empeoially those who have
been told they do not have "logioal mind*.*

Vhat is m*ant. aotually, it indeed important: I
in working with computer* you mutt often work |
out the exact ramification* of *p*oifio combi- \
nations of thing*, without skipping steps. I

But the other mod* of thinking, the intuitive, j
has its plane in the computer field too. I
Whichever your habitual style of mind, oomputere
offer you food — and utensils-- for thought. .

HORRIBLE MISUNDERSTANDINGS

Some people think of computers as things
that somehow mysteriously digest and assimilate
all knowledge. "Juet feed it to the computer." is „
the motto. But what you feed Into the computer
juet alia there unlearn there's a program.

"How would you do that by computer?" ta
a question people often ask. The question ihould
be , "how would you do that at ell?" If there la
a method for doing something which can be broken
down Into simple steps, and requires no human
judgment, then maybe we can take those steps
and program them on a computer. But maybe we
can also think of a simpler way to get (hem done.

Then there la the Idea that a computer la
something you aak questions . This assumes , [
guess, the earlier premise. that the computer
has already digested and assimilated a lot of
stuff and can illng it back at you In naw arrange-

WHAT YOU'VE SEEN PROBABLY HASN'T

"A COMPUTER."

Gel out of your head the notion that some
one system you've seen showed you what
Computers Are Really Like. Computer systems
can be as different externally as bats and whales.
(Yet It’s the same kind of heartbeat, but that's
no help In dealing with them.)

Then what is It computer people know ,
you may ask, that leada them to understand
new systems quickly? Aha. Computer people
simply adjust faster to whole new worlds.

If It Isn't, you

j (or your company , or your state)

i may have been sold e bill of goods .

| OR they may have decided

I your inconvenience la leas important

j than something els s.

I In any caae. you have a right to ask

| sharp questions.

THE AUTOMOBILE ANALOGY (more)

"The Interstate was bumper-to-buaper,
but after we had lunch at the rest stop it
cleared up till we got to the tollbooth.
Then Harry got lost on the interchange,
and we had to double back on the service
road."

How incomprehensible to someone from
1905. Yet how simple-minded when you un¬
derstand it. That’s how it is with cora -

Coaputer talk sounds so strange and
incomprehensible to you folks out there--
yet to us in here it's often as simple as
the lines above-- i_f you know the funda¬
mental concepts.

And nothing in the normal everyday
world will have prepared you for then.

It's not jargon, but the simplest
way to express thoughts in these areas.

Handy questions to aiaa up
what a computer la supposed to
be doing.

What data does U contain?

Where is the data stored?

What other data will It
link up to?

USING A COMPUTER

SHOULD ALWAYS BE EASIER
THAN NOT USING A COMPUTER.

WHAT IE THIS SYSTEM ABOUT?

Actually what must happen. to get
"question*" answered, la this: there must be
some program that pul* Input material into a
data structure . (See "Data Structures.*) Then
you need program* that will oounl and trace,
or whatever, through the data structure In weya
you desire. Than you need a way to atari these
tracing and searching program* going through
the data structure in ways you want. So you
need • program accepting Input from a keyboard,
or whatever, and starting the other program*

In operation. . .

THE DAMNED LIE

"Computers are rigid end inhuman."
A BETTER APPROXIMATION

People are sometime!
rigid and inhuman,
animal* are non human
human" applies only

(ell too ofti
(Machines and
the term "

en)

in-

"Rlgid and Inhuman" computer systems
are the creation of rigid end inhuman
people.

Whet information
do you suppose
can reasonably
b* derived from that?

What are th* key
Input and output device*?

In what forma
does Information
go In and outf

What do you suppose
they might want to know?

in t

A new era in computers is dawning.

The first, or Classic, computer era
used straightforward equipment and work¬
ed on straightforward problems.

TP 4.1)

The second, or Baroque, coaputer
era used intricate equipment for hard-
to-understand purposes, tied together
with the greatest difficulty by com¬
puter professionals who couldn't or
wouldn’t explain very well what they
were doing.

But a change is coming. No one com¬
pany or faction is bringing it about, al¬
though some may feel it is not in their
interest. 1 would like to call it here
the DIAPHANOUS age of the computer.

By "diaphanous" I refer both to the
transparent, understandable character of
the systems to come, and to the likeli¬
hood that computers will be showing us
everything ( dia -. across everything,
phainein , toTFow). (E*"I^- r J t .)

In the first place, COMPUTERS MILL
DISAPPEAR CONCEPTUALLY, will becoate
"transparent", in the sense of b«ing
parts of understandable wholes. More¬
over, the "parts" of a computer system
will have CLEAR CONCEPTUAL MEANING.

In other words, COMPUTER SYSTEMS KILL
BE UNDERSTANDABLE. Instead of things
being complicated, they will become
simple.

Now, many people think computers are by
their nature incomprehensible and complicated--
unfortunately, that’s because they have been
MADE TO BE. Usually this is unintentional,
but 1 fear not always. EXAMPLE. Instead of
being told, "this is the mysterious XYZ comput¬
er, it has to have things just so, you have to
fill out these RMi) forms to go into the VJ4...",
you will hear such surprisingly simple things
as "This system is set up for keeping track of
who owes what to the company. On the screen
you can get lists of accounts and outstanding
bills and who owes them; if you point at ona
with the light pen, the printing machine over
here will print a bill all set to go in the
envelope.'

In other words, systems will increasingly
have UNDERSTANDABLE PARTS WITH UNDERSTANDABLE
INTERCONNECTIONS.'

What is responsible for this remarkable
change?

For one thing, smaller and smaller com¬
panies are buying computer services, and they
won't stand for ridiculous complications.

For another thing, a number of people In the
computer field have gotten sick of systems
that make things hard for people. Finally,
the price of computers, especially micro¬
processors (see p. fW ) are coming down to
fast that they cen be tailored to fit people,
rather than vice vers*. But most of all,
it's jus('timo, that’s all.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

C.L. Freitas, "Making the Best Buy for the
Small Business." Computer Decisions .
March 73, 2 2-26.

Compares the relative costs of
minicomputers and time-sharing; concludes
that minis are the beat buy.

Burton L. Katz, "Making Minicomputers Work
in a MtJium-slzed Business." Data
Processing . Winter 1971, 9-11.

Stresses th* point that well-des¬
igned computer systems can be used by
existing personnel of • firm, without
excessive complication.

Frederic G. Withlngton, "Cosmetic Programming."
Datamation, Mar 70, 91-95. How to make
systems triendly on th* outside.

TWDA&WT

HOW DOES THE LOOP WORK?

THE MA01C OF THE COMPUTER PROGRAM

The basic, central magical interior device
of the computer we shall call a program follower .

A program follower is an electronic device (usually)
which reads symbols specifying operations, carries
out the step each specifies and goes on to the next.

The program follower reads down the list
of instructions in the program , taking each instruction
in turn and carrying it out before it goes on to
the nsxt.

Now. there are program followers that just
do that and nothing more; they have to stop when
they get to the end of the list of instructions.

A true computer, however, can do several
things more.

It can jump back to an earlier point
in the program and go on from there. Repeating
the program in this fashion is called a loop ■

It can perform tests on symbols in
the memory— for instance, to see if a loop
has been done enough times, or if some other
part of the job has been finished-- and jump
to some other program depending on these
symbols. This is called a branch .

Finally, the computer can change
the Information stored in memory. For instance,
it can place an answer in a specific part
of memory.

WHAT, THEN, IS A (Digital) COMPUTER?

A device holding stored symbols
in a changeable memory,
performing operations on some of those symbols
in the memory,

in a sequence specified by other symbols
in the memory,
sble to change the sequence

based on tests of symbols in the memory,
and able to change symbols in the memory.

(For example, do arithmetic and
store the result in the memory.)

Rather than try to slip it to you or prove
it in some fancy way. let's just state baldly: the
power of auch a machine to do almost anything
surpasses all previous technical tricks in human
history.

ftJNdirie

4LL JKVI i&C

Look muc.

HOW CAN A COMPUTER CONTROL

SO MANY DIFFERENT THINGS?

Answer . Different as they may seem, all
devices are controlled in the same way . Every
device has an Interface , that is, its own special
connection setup, and in this interface are the
device registers .

These device registers look the same to the
computer: the computer program simply moves
information patterns into them or moves information
patterns from them to see what they contain.

cotAV’imx

11 *; a*\ 'hfarf&dz ? "

fa LaU^ K»cJr*e.

*Tun*j You 0 ^,“

-"1

Con*

rv-

—

the device needs

—il

heart patient
oil refinery
musical Instrument
display screen
disk memory

The computer, being a machine, doesn't
know or care that device register 17 (say) controls
a hog feeder, or device register 23 (say) receives
information from amog detectors. But what you
choose, in your program, to put into device register
17 , controls what the hogs eat, and what comes
into device register 23 will tell your program,
you hope, about smog conditions. Choosing how
to handle these things in your program la your
business.

The computer does things over and over
by changing a stored count , then testing the stored
count against another number which is what the
count should get to, and going to the beginning
if the desired count has not been reached. This
is called a loop . Of there's no way it can ever
get out, that’s an endless loop.) (Actually, the
program loop Is done the same way as a program
branch: IF a certain count has not been reached,
it branches BACK to the start of the loop.)

Other things besides programs may be stored
in the memory. Anything besides programs are
usually called data.

(erf

r r \r-

—

r'*o

The instructions of programs use the data in different
ways Some programs use a lot of data. some use
a little, some don't use any. It is one of the fascinating
and powerful things about the computer that both
the instructions of s program, and the data they work
on, are stored as patterns of bits in the same memory,
where they can be modified as needed. Indeed, the
program can modify its own patterns of bits, a very
important feature.

WHAT DO PROGRAMS LOOK LIKE?

In what forms are these programs stored,
you ask? Well, they are written by people in computer
languages , which are then stored in some form in
the computer's fast core memory, where the program
follower can act on them. But what does a computer
language look like, you ask? Aha...

Go TO PAGt I b

Gf you want to see what the bottom-most level looks
like, with all the bits and things, skip ahead to p.3£)

WHATEVER IT MAY DO IN THE REAL WORLD,
to the computer program

it's just another device.

ANALOG COMPUTERS DISPOSED OF

There are two kinds of computers: analog
and digital. (Also hybrid . meaning a combination.)
Analog computers are so unimportant compared to
digital computers that we will polish them off in
a couple of paragraphs.

"Analog" is a shortened form of the word
"analogy." Originally an "analog" computer was
one that represented something in the real world
by some other sort of physical enactment-- for
instance, building a model of an economic system
with tubes and liquids; this can demonstrate
Keynesian economic principles remarkably well.

However, the term "analog" has come to mean
almost exclusively pertaining to measurable
electrical signals , and an "analog computer" is
a device that creates or modifies measurable
electric signals. Thus a hi-fi amplifier is an
analog computer (it multiplies the signal), a music
synthesizer is an analog computer (it generates
and reshapes analog signals). Thus the term has
deteriorated: almost anything with wires is an
analog computer.

Analog computers cannot be truly programmed.
only rewired.

Analog equipment is useful, important and
indispensable. But it is simply not in the same
class with digital computers, henceforth called
"computers” In this book, which manipulate symbols
on the basis of changeable symbolic programs.

"Analog computer" also means any way of
calculating that involves measuring approximate
readings, like a slide rule.

W fWMTHt &t°^{

Forget what you’ve ever heard or imagined
about computers. Just consider this:

The computer is the most general machine
man has ever developed. Indeed, it should be
called the All-Purpose Machine, but isn't, for
reasons of historical accident (see nearby).
Computers can control, and receive information
from, virtually any other machine. The computer
is not like a bomb or a gun, which can only des¬
troy , but more like a typewriter, wholly non¬
committal between good and bad in its nature.

The scope of what computers can do is breath¬
taking. Illustrated are some examples (although
having all this happen on one computer would be
unusual). It can turn things on and off, ring
bells, put out fires, type out on printing machines.

THE Au-purpose

Computers are COMPLETELY GENERAL,
with no fixed purpose or style of operation.

In spite of this, the strange myth has evolved
that computers are somehow "mathematical."

Actually von Neumann, who got the general
idea about as soon as anybody (1940s), called
the computer

THE ALL-PURPOSE MACHINE.

(Indeed, the first backer of computers after World
War II was a maker of multi-lightbulb signs. It
is an interesting possibility that if he had not
been killed in an airplane crash , computers
would have been seen first as text-handling and
picture-making machines, and only later developed
for mathematics and business.)

We would call it the All-Purpose Machine
here, except that for historical reasons it has
been slapped with the other name.

A HELPFUL COMPARISON

It helps sometimes to compare computers with typewriters.
Both handle information according to somebody's own viewpoint.

Many ordinary people find computers
intuitively obvious and understandable;
only the complications elude them. Perhaps
these intuitively helpful definitions may help
your intuition as well.

Nervous Question

"Can a Computer

Write a Poem?"

"Can't Computers Only

Behave Mechanistically?"

"Aren't Computers

Completely Impersonal?'

Helpful Parallel

"Can a Typewriter
Write a Poem?"

(Sure. Your poem.)

"Can't Typewriters Only

Behave Mechanistically?"

(Yes, but carrying
out your intent.)

"Aren't Typewriters

Completely Impersonal?"

(Well, it's not like handwriting,
but it’s still what you say.)

1. Think of the computer as a

WIND-UP CROSSWORD PUZZLE.

2. A COMPUTER IS A DEVICE FOR
TWIDDLING INFORMATION. (So, what kinds
of information are there? And what are the
twiddling options? These matters are what
the computer field consists of.)

3. A computer is a completely general
device, whose method of operation may be
c hanged , for handling symbols in any
specific way .

BwinlV Boot\e$

Cybercrud Is not aimed only at laymen.

It can work even among insiders.

The operations manager of a national
time sharing service, for example, was fanatical
about cleanliness. In order to assure a Clean
Computer Room, he said. and hence no dangerous
dust near the tapes or disks . he made a rule
requiring that anyone entering the computer room
had to wear cloth booties over his shoes .

Booties were hung outside for those who
had to enter.

"And 1 had the greatest time making his."
says his wife, laughing. "With the cutest little
bunny faces on them. The buttons were the
hardest part to get - you know , the ones with
eyes that roll !" She laughs very hard as she
tells this.

"Of course there was no need for it." he
now chortles, "but it sure kept people out of the
computer room."

(That’s applied logic for you.)

Ci )-^

COMPUTERS
AND THEIR PRIESTS

First get it through your head that computers are big,
expensive, fast, dumb adding-machine-typewriters. Then
realize that most of the computer technicians that you're
likely to meet or hire are complicators, not simplifiers.
They’re trying to make it look tough. Not easy. They're
building a mystique, a priesthood, their own mumbo-
jumbo ritual to keep you from knowing what they - and
you-- are doing.”

-- Robert Townsend,

Up The Organization (Knopf), p, 36.

Ute ciwo-cvir ASPedr

Outsiders arc often prey to cybercrud they
dream up themselves. I once knew a college
registrar’s office where they had been getting
along fine for years with paper forms. The year
before the computer was slated to arrive, they
started using file cards filled out by hand, instead.
Why? "Well, we thought that would make it easier
for the computer. Computers use cards, don't they?”

Note that referring to a computer as if it were
a living creature is n<rt cybercrud; to say that a
program "looks at" a device, "tries to" effect a
procedure, and "goes to sleep," are all colorful
brief ways of describing what really happens.

(See Guidelines for Writers and Spokesmen, p. V7 )

NttfTjte&TTwetr
PWiV w fosszx?

Cybercrud is, of course, just one branch of
THE GREAT GAME OF
TECHNOLOGICAL PRETENSE
that has the whole world in its grasp.

tea

4 M —

urftu tkl)

Public thinking about computers is heavily
tinged by a peculiar image which we may call the
Myth of the Machine. It goes as follows: there is
something called the Machine, which is Taking Over
The World. According to this point of view
The Machine is a relentless, peremptory, repetitive,
invariable, monotonous, inexorable, implacable,
ruthless, inhuman, dehumanizing, impersonal
Juggernaut, brainlessly carrying out repetitive
(and often violent) actions. Symbolic of this
is of course Charlie Chaplin, dodging the relent¬
less. repetitive, monotonous, implacable,
dehumanizing gears of a machine he must deal with
in the film Modern Times .

Ordinarily this view of The Machine Is
contrasted with an idea of a Warm Human Being,
usually an idealized version of the person thinking
these thoughts.

The Warm

Machine^ Human

Being

But consider something. The model often
goes further than this. The Machine is cold, the
Human Being emotional and warm. Yet there is
such a thing as being too emotional and warm.

There is in fact a third type in the schema, the
being who goes too for on the same scale. Strangely,
he has ot least three different names, though the
picture of him is abstractly the same;

X- X

The Warm

Machine Human

Being

"Bum”

'Nigger”

"Hippie”

Now. "bums." "niggers” and "hippies" are
not real people. The words are derogatory slang
for the destitute, for persons with any African
ancestry, and for people dressing in certain styles.
But the remarkable thing about the slang is that
all three of these derogatory terms seem to have
the same connotation in our culture: someone who
is dirty , lazy and lascivious . In other words,
whatever distinguishes The Machine from the
Warm Human Being is carried too far by the bunch
at the other end.

In other words, this conceptual continuum
is a single, fundamental scale in our culture:
why is unclear. Since most people consider
themselves-- naturally!-- to be in the middle
category. it acts as a sort of reference continuum
of two bad things on either side.

It also has another effect: it supplies a
derogatory way of seeing. On the right hand side,
it allows many Americans not to see, or to see
only with disgust, the destitute and those with
African ancestry and those dressing in hippie style.
But this book isn't about that.

The left side of the continuum is our present
concern. There, too. people refuse to see. What
people mainly refuse to ace is that machines in
general aren't like that , relentless, repetitive,
monotonous, implacable, dehumanizing. Oh, there
are some machines like that, particularly the
automobile assembly line. But the assembly line
was designed the way it is because it gets the most
work out of people. It gets the work it does out of
people by the way it exerts pressure.

So here we see the same old trick; people
building a system and saying it has to work that way
because it’s a machine, rather than because that's
how 1 designed it.

To make the point clearer, let’s consider
some other machines.

The automobile is a machine, but it la hardly
the repetitive, "dehumanized" thing we usually
hear about. It goes uphill, downhill, left and right,
fast and slow. It may be decorated. It is the scene
of many warm human activities. And most impor¬
tantly . automobiles are very much the extension of
their owners . exemplify ing life-style, personality,
and ideology. Consider the Baja Buggy Volkswagen
and the ostentatious cushy Cadillac. Consider the
dashboard ornament and the bumper sticker.

The Machine, indeed.

The camera is a machine, but one that allows
its user to freeze and preserve the views and Images
of the world he wants.

The bicycle is a machine. but one that brings
you into personal and non-polluting contact with
nature, or at least that stylized kind of nature
accessible to bicycle paths.

To sum up, then. The Machine is a myth.

The bad things in our society are the
products of bad systems, bad decisions
and conceivably bad people, in various
combinations. Machines per se are
essentially neutral, though some machines
can be built which are bad indeed,
such as bombs, guns and death-camps.

The myth of The Machine la a curious aspect
of our ideology . Is it especially
American, or world-wide?

If we ignore this myth we can see each possible
machine or system for what it la, and
study how it ties in with human life
for good or ill, fostering or lousing up
such things as the good life, preser¬
vation of species, love and self-respect.

W MTH

"The computer is the ultimate Rorschach
test,” Freed Bales said to me twelve years ago.

Dr. Bales, a Harvard psychologist, was somewhat
perturbed by the papers he was getting in his
seminar on computer modelling in the social
sciences. Somewhat nutty people in the seminar
were writing somewhat nutty papers for him.

And truer words were never spoken. On
this point I find Bales has been terribly, terribly
right. The computer is an incredible projective
test: what you see in the computer comes right off
the back wall of your psyche. In over a decade
in the field I have not ceased to marvel at the way
people's personalities entwine with the computer,
each making it his own- - or rejecting it-- in his
own, often unique and peculiar way, deeply re¬
flecting his concerns and what is in his heart.

Yes. odd people are attracted to the computer,
and the bonds that hold them are not those of
casual interest.

In fact, people tend to identify with it.

In this light we may consider the often-
heard remarks about computers being rigid,
narrow, and inflexible. This is of course true in
a sense, but the fact that some people stress it
over and over is an important clue to something
about them. My own impression is that the people
who stress this aspect are the comparatively rigid,
narrow and inflexible people.

Other computer experts, no less worthy,
tell us the computer is a supertoy. the grandest
play machine ever to be discovered. These
people tend to be the more outgoing, generous
and playful types.

In a classic study, psychiatrist Bruno
Bettelheim examined a child who thought he was
a machine , who talked in staccato monosyllables.
walked jerkily and decorated the side of his bed
with gears. We will not discuss here the prob¬
able origins and cure of this complex: but we
must consider that identifying with machines is
a crucial cultural theme in American society,
nn available theme for all of us. And it well may
be that computer people are partaking of this same
self-image: in a more benign form, perhaps, a
shift of gears (as it were) from Bettelheim'a
mechanical child, but still on the sume track.

Some of the computer high-chool kids I've
known, because of their youth, have been even
more up-front about this than udults.

I know one boy. for instance, whose dream
was to put a 33ASR Teletype on wheels under
radio control, and alarm people ut the computer
conference by having it roll up to them and clatter
out questions impersonally. (If you knew the kid
- aloof and haughty-seeming- you might think
that's how he approaches people in real life.)

1 know a high-school boy (not a computer
expert) who programmed a computer to type out
a love story, using the BASIC "print" command,
the only one he knew. He could not bring
himself to write the love story on paper.

The best example I can think of. though,
took place at the kidB' booth (see p .¥} > “* “
computer conference. One of the more withdrawn
girls was sitting at an off-line video terminal,
idly typing things onto the screen. When she
had gone a sentence remained, it said:

1 love you all, but at a distance.

I -1

(On the other side of this book, Dream
Machines, we will carry this matter further.
The moat exciting things in the computer field
are coming from people trying to realize their
wildest dreams by computer: artificial intel¬
ligence. computer music, computer picture¬
making and so on.)

A number of people have gotten mad si me
for coining the term "cybercrud." which I define
as "putting things over on people using computers.
But as long as it goes on we'll need the word At
every corner of our society , people are issuing
pronouncements and making other people do things
and saving it's because of the computer . The
function of cybercrud is thus to confuse, intimi¬
date or pressure. We have all got to get wise to
this if it is going to be curtailed.

Cybercrud takes numerous forms. All of
them, however, share the patina of "science" that
computers have for the layman.

la) COMPUTER AS MAGIC WORD

The moat delicate, and seemingly innocent,
technique is the practice or naming things so as
spuriously to suggest that they involve computers.
Thus there is a manufacturer of pot-pipes with
"Data" in its name, and apparently a pornography
house with a "Cyber-".

lb) COMPUTER AS MAGIC INGREDIENT

The above seems silly, but it is no less silly
than talking about "computer predictions" and
"computer studies" of things. The mere fact that
a computer is^ involved in something has no bearing
on its character or validity . The way things are
done with computers affects their character and
validity, just like the way things are done without
computers. (Indeed, merely using a computer
often has no bearing on the way things are done.)

This same technique is easily magnified to
suggest, not merely that something involves
computers, but is wholly done by computers. The
word "computerize" performs this fatal function.
When used specifically, as in computerize the
billing operation , it can be fairly clear; but make
it vague, as in computerize the office , and it can
mean anything.

"Fully computerize" is worse. Thus we hear
about a "fully computerized" print shop, which
turns out to be one whose computers do the type¬
setting; but they could also run the presses, pay
the bills and work the coffee machine. For prac¬
tical purposes, there is no such thing as "fully”
computerized. There is always one more thing
computers could do.

2) WHITE LIES: THE COMPUTER MADE ME DO IT

Next come all the leelle white lies about how
such-and-such ia the computer's fault and not
your decision. Thus the computer ia made a
General Scapegoat at the same time it's covering up
for what somebody wants to do anyway .

"It has to be this way."

"There's nothing we can do; this ia all
handled by computer."

"The computer will not allow this."

"The computer won't let ua."

The translation ia, of course, THE STINKY LOUSY
PROGRAM DOES NOT PERMIT IT. Which means in
turn: WE DO NOT CHOOSE TO PROVIDE. IN OUR
PROGRAMS AND EQUIPMENT. ANY ALTERNATIVES.

Now , it is often the case that good and
sufficient reason exists for the way things are done.
But it ia also often the case that companies and the
public are inconvenienced, or worse, by decisions
the computer people make and than hide with their
Claim of technical necessity . (Seep.tfi,: Dealing
with computer people.)

3) YAGOTTAS: COMPUTER AS COERCER

More aggressively, cybercrud Is a technique
for making people do what you want. "The com¬
puter requires it," you say , and so people can be
made to hand over personal information, secretaries
can be intimidated into scouring the files, payment
schedules can be artificially enforced.

THE GENERAL STATUS TRICK

Status tricks, combining the putdown and
the self-boost, date back to times immemorial.

But today they take new forma. The biggest trick
is to elevate yourself and demean the listener at
the same time, or, more generally, the technique
is making people feel stupid while acting like a
big cheese. Thus someoneone might say ,

"People must begin to get used to (he objec¬
tive scientific ways of doing things
that computers now make necessary."
But the translation seems to be:

"People must get used to the inflexible,

badly thought out, inconvenient and
unkind systems that I and other
self-righteous individuals and com¬
panies are inflicting on the world."

YOU DON’T ALWAYS GOTTA

The uninformed are bulldozed, and even
the informed are pressured, by the foolish myths
of the clever, implacable and scientific computer
to which they must adapt. People are told they
have to "relate to the computer." But actually
they are being made to relate to systems humans
have designed around it, in much the same way
a sword dance is designed around the sword.

When establishment computer people say
that the computer requires you to be systematic,
they generally mean you have to learn their system.
But anyone who tells you a method "has to be
changed for the computer" is usually fibbing.

He prefers to change the method for the computer.
The reasons may be bad or good. Often the
computer salesman or indoctrinator will present
as "scientific” techniques which were doped out
or whomped up by a couple of guys in the back

"If it can't be done in COBOL,

I Just tell people it can't be done by computer.
It saves a lot of trouble."

Attributed to somebody in Rochester.
(See COBOL. p7) | .)

it v

s L->

In the movie "Fail-Safe," they showed you
lots of fake tape drives with the reels constantly
turning in one direction. This they called a
"computer ," Calling any sinister box "a computer"
is a widespread trick. Gives people the willies.
Keeps ’em in line.

Here is an example, as told to me. A friend
of mine worked in a dress factory where they had
a perfectly good system for billing and bookkeeping.
Customers were listed by name and kept in alpha¬
betical order. The fast pace of the garment indus¬
try meant that companies often changed names, and
so various companies had a number of different
names in the file. This bothered nobody because
the people understood the system.

Then management bought a small computer,
never mind what brand, and hired a couple of guys
to come in and put the bookkeeping system on it.

Still okay. Indeed, small programming firms
can sometimes do this sort of thing very well,
because they can work flexibly with the people
and don’t necessarily feel committed to making it
work a certain way .

Well, this was a nice instance where the
existing system could have been exactly trans¬
ferred to the computer. The fact that some custom¬
ers had several names would certainly have been
no problem; a program could have been written
that allowed users to type any acceptable customer
name, causing the computer to look up the correct
account (and if desired. print its usual name and
ask for verification).

But no. The guys did not answer employees'
questions comprehensibly, nor did they want sug¬
gestions. They immediately decreed that since
computers only worked with numbers (a fib. but
a convenience to them), every customer would
thenceforth have to be referred to by number.

After that the firm had nothing but trouble,
through confusion over the multiple names, ond
my friend predicted that this would destroy the
company. I haven't heard the outcome.

This story is not necessarily very inter¬
esting; it merely happened. It's not a made-up
example.

Moral: until we overthrow the myth that
people always have to adapt to computers, rather
than the other way around, Ihinga will never go
right. Adaptations should take place on both
sides, darn It.

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You can buy little boxes with blinking
lights that do nothing else but blink. They
really put people uptight. "Are you recording
what I say’" people ask. "Is it a computer?"

They’ll believe such a box is anything you tell them.

EVERYBODY DOES IT

Cybercrud is by no means the province of
computer people alone. Business manipulators
and bureaucrats have quickly learned the tricks.
Companies do it to the public. The press , indeed,
contributes (see Suggestions for Writers and
Spokesmen, p. ^7 > ■ But the computer people are
best at it because they have more technicalities
to shuttle around magically; they can put anybody
down.

Now , computer people do deserve respect.
So many things that people do with computer# ere
herd . It can be understood that they want to be
appreciated, and if not for the particulars, for
the machismo (machinlsmo?) of coping with intri¬
cacy . But that ia no excuse for keeping others In
controlled ignorance. No man hae a right to be
proud that he is preserving and manipulating
the ignorance of others .

1) to manipulate situations.

2) to control others.

3) to fool

4) to look like hot stuff.

5) to keep outsiders from seeing through something.

6) to sell something.

7) to put someone down.

8 ) to conceal.

9) general secretiveneas.

10) low expectation of others’ mentality .

11) seeking to be the broker and middleman for

all relations with the computer.

12) vagueness sounds profound.

13) you don’t have to show what you're not sure of.

14) your public image is monolithic.

15) you really don't know

THE MAIN COMPUTER ORGANIZATIONS

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery.

This is the main computer professional
society; the title only has meaning histor¬
ically. as many members are concerned not
with machinery itself, but with software,
languages, theories and so on.

If you have any plans to stick with
the subject, membership in the Association
for Computing Machinery is highly recom¬
mended. ACM calls itself "The Society of
the Computing Community." Thus it properly
embraces both professionals and fans.

Dues for official students are $8 a yea^ji
$35 for others, which includes a subscription
to Communications of the ACM . the official ^
mag. Their address for memberships and
magazines is ACM, P.O. Box 12105,

Church St. Station, New York, NY 10249.

(The actual ACM HQ is at 1133 Ave. of the
Americas, New York, N.Y. 10036.)

They have stacked the deck so that
if you want to subscribe to any ACM maga¬
zines you'd better join anyway . Here are
the year prices:

Member Non-Member

Communications of the ACM

free

$35

Computing Surveys

$25

Computing Reviews

$12.50

$35

Journal of the ACM

$30

The one drawback to joining the ACM
is all the doggoned mailing lists it gets you
on. It's unclear whether there's anything
you can do to prevent this, but there oughta
be.

SIGs and SICs . For ACM members
with special interests (and we all have them),
the ACM contains subdivisions-- clubs within
the club, of people who keep in touch to
share their interests. These are called SICs
(Special Interest Committees) and SIGs
(Special Interest Groups). There are such
clubs-- SICs and SIGs— in numerous areas,
including Programming Languages , Computer
Usage in Education, etc. Encouraging these
subinterests to stay within ACM saves a lot
of trouble for everybody and keeps ACM the
central society.

AFIPS.

AFIPS is the UN of computing. They
sponsored the Joints, and now sponsor the
NCC. Just as individuals can't join the UN,
they can't join AFIPS, which stands for
American Federation of Information Proces¬
sing Societies. Depending on your special
interests, though, you can join a member
society.

The constituent societies of AFIPS are,
as of June 1973: (If any turn you on, write
AFIPS for addresses: AFIPS, 210 Summit Ave.,
Montvale NJ 07645.)

ft ACM: the Association for Computing Machinery ,

IEEE, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics

Engineers. This is the professional society
of electronics guys.

Simulation Councils. This is the professional
society for those interested in Simulation
(see p.TiKy.

Association for Computational Linguistics . (Where
language and computer types gather.)

American Association of Aeronautics and
Astronautics.

American Statistical Association.

Instrument Society of America.

Society for Information Display . (See flip side. )

American Institute of Certified Public Accountants.

American Society for Information Science. (This
group is mainly for electronifled librarians
and information retrieval types-- see
flip side.)

Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.

Special Libraries Association.

Association for Educational Data Systems.

IFIP. This is the international computer society.
Like AFIPS, its members are societies, so
joining ACM makes you an IFIP participant.

CONFERENCES .

Conferences in any field are exciting, at least
till you reach a certain degree of boredom with the
field. Computer conferences have their own heady
atmosphere , compounded of a sense of elitism , of
being in the witches' cauldron, and the sure sense
of the impact everything you see will have as it all
grows and grows. Plus you get to look at gadgets.

Usually to go for one day doesn't cost much,
and at the bigger ones you get lots of free literature,
have salesmen explain their things to you, see
movies, hear fascinating (sometimes) speakers.

THE JOINTS! The principal computer confer¬
ences have always been the Spring Joint
Computer Conference, held in an
astern city in May, and the Fall Joint
Computer Conference, held in a Western
city in November (the infamous Spring
Joint and Fall Joint, or SJCC and FJCC).
In 1973, because of poor business the
previous year, the two were collapsed
into one National Computer Conference
(NCC) in June (Universal Joint?) The
Joints have always been sponsored by
AFIPS (see below). The National
Computer Conference will henceforth
be annual, at least for a while .

The cost of attending is high--
while it's just a couple of dollars to
look at the exhibits, this rises to
perhaps fifteen dollars to go to the day's
technical sessions or fifty for the week
(not counting lodging and eats)-- but
it's very much worth it. The lower age
limit for attendees is something like
twelve, unfortunately for those
with interested children.

Other important conferences: the annual ACM
conference in the summer; BEMA
(Business Equipment Mfrs. Assn.)
in the fall and spring (no theory, but
lots of gadgets); and other conferencs
on special subjects, held all the time
all over. Lists of conferences and
their whereabouts are in most of the
magazines; Communications of the ACM
and Computer Design have the biggest
lists.

CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS ** AC*\fc5/

V *">*, \

<t{CT5.'J

As you may know , conferences largely con¬
sist of separate "sessions" in which different people
talk on specific topics, usually reading out loud from
their notes and showing slides.

Conference proceedings are books which
result from conferences. Supposedly they contain
what each guy said; in practice people say one thing
and publish another, more formal than the actual
presentation.

This leads to a curious phenomenon at the
main computer conferences (SJCC.FJCC. ACM and
now NCC). When you register they give you a book
(you're actually paying perhaps $15 for it), contain¬
ing all the papers that are about to be given, nicely
tricked out by their authors. If you rush to a corner
and look at the book it may change your notion of
which sessions to go to.

Anyway . the resulting volumes of conference
proceedings are a treasure trove of interesting papers
on an immense variety of computerish and not-so-
computerish subjects. Great for browsing.

Expensive but wonderful. (Horrible when you're
moving, though, as they are big and heavy.)

JOINT PROCEEDINGS. Proceedings for the
Spring Joint and Fall Joint, from the
fifties to 1972. are available from AFIPS
Press, as are proceedings of the 1973
NCC. (AFIPS Press, 210 Summit Avenue,
Montvale NJ 07645.) They cost $20-26
each after the conference is over; less
in microfilm. (At the Joint Conferences,
AFIPS Press often gives discounts, at
their booth, on back Joint proceedings.)

t^>If you want to spend money to
learn about the field. Proceedings of
the Joint Conferences are a fine buy.

Back ACM Proceedings . From the ACM.

Other Proceedings . Often sold at counters at
conferences. Or available from various
publishers. Join the ACM and you'll
find out soon enough .

TRY TO GET TO THE NATIONAL JOINT. Just as
every Muslim should go to Mecca, every
computer fan should go to a National Joint
(National Computer Conference, or NCC).
The next two are (check the magazines):

May 1974, Chicago

May 1975 rS on Fr a noi s o o- f\ M A H .

NO QUALIFICATIONS ARE NEEDED . Think of it
as a circus for smart alecks, or, if you
prefer, a Deep Educational Experience.

VOH^T if You nice ^cMporeit tookjci?

There is a lot of talk about "best" ways of teaching about computers, but in most places
the actual alternatives open to those who want to learn are fairly dismal.

Universities . Universities and colleges tend to teach computing with a mathematical
emphasis at the start. Indeed, most seem to require that to get into the introductory computer
course, you must have had higher math (at least calculus, sometimes matrix algebra as well).
This is preposterous, like requiring an engineering degree to drive a car. (Gradeschool kids
can learn to program with no prerequisites.)

t£>- It seems to be to cut down enrollment, since they're not set up to deal with all those
people who want to learn about computers. (And why not?) Also it's a status thing; as if
this restriction somehow should keep enrollment to students with "logical minds, whatever
those are, or "mathematical sophistication," as if that were relevant.

IFIP holds conferences around the
world. Fun, Expense.

" Computer schools," community and commercial colleges, on the other hand, tend to
prepare students only for the most humdrum business applications-- keypunching (which is
rapidly becoming obsolete), and programming in the COBOL language on IBM business systems.
This gets you no closer to the more exciting applications of computers than you were originally.

Some experimental trends are more encouraging. Some colleges, for instance, offer
"computer appreciation courses." with a wider introduction to what's available and more varied
programming intended to serve as an introduction to this wider horizon.

Highschool courses seem to be cutting through the junk and offering students access to
minicomputers with quickie languages, usually BASIC. Both Digital Equipment Corp. and
Hewlett-Packard seem to be making Inroads here.

Kiddle setups , rumored to exist in Boston and San Francisco, are geared to letting
grade-school children see and play with computers. Also one company (General Turtle, see
p. k 3'/) is selling computer toys intended to encourage actual programming by children.

VOOE

JUTOrtyinoiJ 'W«5

There are several major places you get infor¬
mation In the computer field: friendB. magazines,
bingo cards, conferences and conference proceedings.

FRIENDS.

Computer . (Formerly IEEE Computer Group
News.) $12/yr. Thoughtful, clearly
written articles on high-level topics.
Quite a bit on Artificial Intelligence
(see flip side). IEEE Computer Society,
16400 Ventura Blvd., Encino CA 91316.

Here are some other magazines that may
interest you. No particular order.

PCC . Delightful educational/counterculture
tabloid emphasizing computer games
and fun. Oriented to BASIC language.
$4/yr. from People's Computer Com¬
pany, P.O. Box 310, Menlo Park,

CA 94025.

Friends we can't help with. But you might
make some at conferences. Or join a computer club?

MAGAZINES.

The principal magazines are (first few listed
roughly by degree of general interest):

Datamation . $15 a year or free. The main
computer magazine, a breezy, clever
monthly. Lots of ads, interesting arti¬
cles the layman can read with not much
effort. Twits IBM.

Subscriptions are $15 if you're
not a computer person, free if you are.
Datamation , 35 Mason St., Greenwich
CT 06830.

Computer Decisions . Some $7 a year or free.
Some nice light articles, as well as
helpful review articles on different
subjects. Avoids technicalities.
Computer Decisions , 50 Essex St. ,
Roselle Park NJ 07662.

Computers and Automation . Avoids techni¬
calities but quite a bit of social-interest
stuff. Nobody gets it free; something
like $7.50 a year. Berkeley Enter¬
prises, Inc., 815 Washington St. ,
Newtonville, Mass. 02160.

Computing Reviews . Prints reviews, by

individuals in the field, of most of the
serious computer articles. Useful, but
subject to individual biases and gaps.
(See ACM, below.)

The New Educational Technology' . $5/yr.

Presumably concentrates on activities
of its publisher: General Turtle, Inc. ,
545 Technology Square, Cambridge,

MA 02139: wonderful computer toys for
schools and the well-heeled.

The Honeywell Computer Journal . Something
like $10 a year. Honeywell Information
Systems, Inc., Phoenix, Arizona.
Showcase magazine of miscellaneous
content; readable, nicely edited. Has
unusual practice of including microfiche
(microfilm card) of entire issue in a
pocket.

IBM Systems Journal . Showcase technical
journal of miscellaneous content,
especially arcana about IBM products.
$5/yr. IBM, Armonk, NY 10504.

IBM Journal of Research and Development .
Showcase technical journal of miscel¬
laneous content. $7.50/year. IBM,
Armonk, NY 10504.

Computcrworld (actually a weekly tabloid
paper). Not free: $9 a year. More
up-to-the-minute than most people
have time to be. Computerworld ,
Circ. Dept., 797 Washington St..
Newton, Mass, 02160.

Computing Surveys . Excellent, clearly
written introductory articles on a
variety of subjects. Any serious
beginner should definitely subscribe
to Computing Surveys. (See ACM,
below.)

Journal of the ACM . A highly technical, math-
'A oriented journal. Heavy on graph theom
' ' / and pattern recognition. (See ACM.

below.)

Digital Design . $15 or free. About computer
parts and designs. Digital Design ,

Circ. Dept. , 167 Corey Road, Brookline,
Mass. 02146.

Infosystems . Aspiring mag. $20 or free.

Hitchcock Publicatons. P.O. Box 3007,
Wheaton, Ill. 60187.

Communications of the ACM . High-class
•Aar' a*'' journal about theoretical matters and
* CV-Jy events on the intellectual side of the
field. (See ACM, below.)

Think . This is the IBM house organ .

Presumably free to IBM customers
or prospects. IBM. Armonk, NY 10504,

Computer Design . $18/yr. or free. Concen¬
trates on parts for computers, but also
tells technical details of new computers
and peripherals. Computer Design ,
Circulation Dept. . P.O. Box A,
Winchester, Mass. 01890.

There are also expensive (snob?) magazines,
bought by executives.

Computer Age . $95/yr. EDP News Services
Inc., 514 10th St. N.W., Washington
DC 20004.

Date Processing magazine. Oriented to

conventional business applications of
computers. $10. North American
Publishing Co., 134 N. 13th St..
Philadelphia. Pa. 19107.

Computer Digest . $36/yr. Information Group,
1309 Cherry St. , Philadelphia PA 19107.

Data Processing Digest . $51/yr. 6820

la Tijera Blvd. , Los Angeles CA 90045.

Hey now, here's a magazine called Computopia . Only $15 a year. Unfortunately in Japanese.
Computer Age Co. Ltd., Kasumigaseki Bldg., Box 122, Chiyoda-Ku, Tokyo, Japan.

"fr ft mwffcr

A number of inexpensive gadgets purport to
teach you computer principles. Many people have been
disappointed, or worse, made to feel stupid, when they
learn nothing from these. Actually the best these things
really can do is give you an idea of what can be done
with combinations of switches. From that to learning
what computer people really think about is a long, long
way.

(JW

G$°°KS l ^'<^5

The best review of what's happening lately, by
none other than Mr. Whole Earth Catalog
himself: Stewart Brand, "Spacewar:
Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death among
the Computer Bums." Rolling Stone . 2
December 72. 50-56. He visited the most
hotshot places and reports especially on
> the fun-and-games side of things.

Gilbert Burck and the Editors of Fortune, The
Computer Age . Harper and Row . Ignore
the ridiculous full title. The Computer Age
and Its Potential for Management ; this book
ha3 nothing to do with management, but is
a nice general orientation to the field.

Thomas H. Crowley, Understanding Computers .

McGraw-Hill. This is the most readable and
straightforward introduction to the techni¬
calities around.

Jeremy Bernstein. The Analytical Engine . Random
House, 1964. History of computers, well told,
and the way things looked in 1964, which
wasn't really very different.

Donald E. Knuth, The Art of Programming . (7 vols.)
A monumental series. excellently written and
widely praised, for anyone who wants to dig
in and be a serious programmer. Three of
the seven volumes are out so far. at about
twenty bucks apiece. Vol. 1: Fundamental
Algorithms . Vol. 2: Seminumerical
Algorithms . Vol. 3: Sorting and Searching .
Addison-Wesley.

BUMMERS

This is perhaps a minority view, but 1 think
any introduction to computers which makes them
seem intrinsically mathematical is misleading.
Historically they began as mathematical, but now
this is simply the wrong way to think about them .
Same goes for emphasizing business uses as if
that were ail.

We will not name here any of the various
disagreeable pamphlets and books which stress
these aspects and don't make things very clear.

R>ABOUT FREE SUBSCRIPTIONS. Many of the
magazines are free to "qualified" readers, usually
those willing to state on a signed form that they
influence the purchase of computers. computer ser¬
vices, punch cards, or the like. (They ask other
questions on the form, but whether you influence
purchase is usually what decides whether they
sci.d you the magazine.) It is also helpful to have
a good-sounding title or company affiliation.

k BINGO CARDS.

These are little postcards you find in all the

I magazines except the ACM and company ones. Fill
in your name and an attractive title ("Systems
Consultant" or "consultant" is good- after all,
someday someone may ask your advice) and circle
the numbers corresponding to the ads that entice
you. You’ll be flooded with interesting, expensively
printed, colorful, educational material on different
people's computers and accessories. And note that
senders don't lose: any company wants its products
known.

However, a postoffice box is good, as it helps
to avoid calls at home from salesmen, wasting their
time as much as yours. If you arc in a rural-type
area where you can assume a company name with no
legal difficulties, so much the better.

POfOCAK

That the field has run boon popularized by its
better writers may simply come from an honest doubt
that ordinary people cun understand computers.

1 dispute that. Through magazines, millions
of Americans have learned about photography. Through
the popular sciencc-and-mochanics type magazines,
and more recently the electronics magazines, various
other technical subjects have become widely understood.

So far nobody has opened up computers. This
is a first attempt. If this book won't do it another one
will.

And you better believe that Popular Computers
magazine Is not very far owny . Soon a fully-loaded
minicomputer will cost loss than the best hi-fi sets.

In a couple of years, thousands of individuals will
own computers, and millions more wiU want to. Look
out. here we go.

4 -

Woops, here it is . Popular Computing . $15 a year

($12 if prepaid), Box 272, Celabosas. CA 91302.

^cule^U^ — )

People ask me often where they can learn

about "science." As in all fields, maga¬
zines are usually the best sources of
general orientation.

Science Diges t is kind of helpful for a start,

although unfortunately they print summaries
of every fool study that generalizes to the
hearts of all humanity from two dozen Iowa
State freshmen.

Scientific American is the favorite. Some stuff
is hard to read but some .isn't; the pic¬
tures and diagrams are terrific.

Science k Technology magazine seems to me

one of the better ones-- breezy, informa¬
tive, not trivial.

Science magazine is read by most actual scien¬
tists, and if you have a lively curiosity
and can guess at the meanings’of words,
will tell you an incredible amount. (This
is a main source for the science articles
in the New York Times , which in turn...)
Their articles on politics of science, and
the future, are very interesting, important,
and depressing. You have to join Am. Assn,
for the Advancement of Science, Washington,
D.C.

Daniel S. Greenberg's Science and Government

Report (sorry-- $35 a year) is what really
tellB it. Greenberg is the man who knows,
both what is shaping up in science and
the insane governmental confusions and
floundering responses and grandstanding
and pork-barrel initiatives. ..

Greenberg is, incidentally, one of
the finest writers of our time and a great
humorist.

Science and Government Repo rt,
Kalorama Station (really?). Box 21123,
Washington, D.C. 20009.

This is the wall that the handwriting

is on.

y\ipecry of tw

The explanations— not yet fully debugged-- are
intended for anybody. The listings of expensive products
and services are intended not only as corroborative detail,
for a general sense of what's available, but also for
business people who might find them helpful, for affluent
individuals and clubs who want to try their hand, and
finally as a box score of how the prices are coming down.
Because we are all going to be able to afford these things
pretty soon.

This diagram shows the amazing and unique way prices
drop in the computer field. The prices shown are for the first
minicomputer, the PDP-5 (and its hugely popular offspring, the
PDP-8); but the principle has held throughout the field, and the
downward trend will probably accelerate due to the new big
integrated circuits.

Another example: an IBM 7090, a very decent million-dollar
computer in I960, was put up for sale at a modish Parke-Bernet
"used computer auction" in 1970. If I remember aright, they
could not get a $1000 bid , because today's machines are so much
smaller, faster and more dependable.

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II) Tills BOOK

2 INTRO

4 "Where It's At"

6 Sources of Information

5 CYBERCRUD

9 THE MYTH OF THE COMPUTER

10 The Power and the Glory

11 THE DEEP DARK SECRET
(Computer Basics Reduced
to One Easy Page)

12 THE NEW ERA

13 INTERACTIVE SYSTEMS

14 TERMINALS

15 COMPUTER LANGUAGES: Prelude

16 1. BASIC

18 2. TRAC® Language

22 3. APL

26 DATA STRUCTURES

27 Binary Patterns

30 COMPUTER LANGUAGES: Postscript
32 ROCK BOTTOM: Inner Languages

of Computers;

Computer Architecture

34 BUCKY'S WRISTWATCH, a sample
machine-language program

35 The Assembler

36 Your Basic Computer Structure:
THE MINICOMPUTER

38 BIG COMPUTERS

40 GREAT COMPUTERS: Sketches

of Some Specific Machines

43 List of Mini Makers

44 MICROPROCESSORS
(The New Third Kind
of Computer)

45 ADVANCED PROGRAMS

45 OPERATING SYSTEMS

45 TIME-SHARING

46 COMPUTER PEOPLE

47 Program Negotiation

47 Suggestions for Writers

48 Fun and Games

50 How Computer Stuff is
Bought and Sold

51 How Computer Companies are
Financed, Sometimes

52 IBM

57 Digital Equipment Corporation

57 Peripherals for Your Mini

58 SIMULATION

58 OPERATIONS RESEARCH

58 GREAT ISSUES

58 MILITARY USES OF COMPUTERS

59 The ABM System

60 DNA

62 DAMN THAT COMPUTER!

64 STUFF YOU MAY RUN INTO
68 THE CLUB OF ROME

THE BUCK STOPS HERE

Everywhere in the world people can pretend
that your ignorance, or position, or credentials, or
poverty, or general unworthiness, are the reasons
you are being pushed around or made to feel small.
And because you can't tell, you have to take it.

And of course we can do the same thing with
computers. Yes, we can do it in spades. (See
"Cybercrud," p. 8.) But many of us do not want to.
There has to be a better way. There has to be a
better world.

■UH«£ IT'S AT

Computers are where it's at.

Recently a bank employee was accused of
embezzling a million and a half dollars by clever
computer programming. His programs shifted
funda from hundreds of people's accounts to his
own. but spparently kept things looking innocent
by clever programming tricks. According to the
papers, the program kept up appearances by
redepoaiting the stolen amount in each account just
as interest payments were about to be calculated,
then withdrawing it again just after. ("Chief
Teller Is Accused of Theft of $1.5 Million at a Bank
Here." New York Times , 23 March 73, p. 1.)

The alleged embezzlement was discovered, not by
bank audit, but by records found on the premises
of a raided bookmaker.

In a recent scandal that has rocked the
insurance world, an insurance company appear?
to have generated thousands of fictitious customers
and accounts by computer, than bilked other
insurance companies— those who re-tnsured the
original fictitious policies*- by fictitious claims
on the fictitious misfortunes of the fictitious
policy-holders.

In April of 1973. according to the Chicago
radio, a burglary ring had a "computerized" list
of a thousand prospective victims.

The obvious consequence is simply for the
computer people to be allowed to take over
altogether. It may Indeed be that computer people
-- the more well-informed and visionary ones,
anyway-- can see the farthest, and appreciate
moat deeply the better ways things can go, and
the steps that have to be taken to get there. (And
Boards of Managers can at least be partially assured
that hanky-panky at the lower levels will be
prevented. if men in charge know where the bodies
are buried. >

That seems to be how it's going. Examples:

The president of Dartmouth College. John
Kemeny, is a respected computer man and a devel¬
oper of one of the important computing languages,
BASIC (see p. ).

The new president of the Russell Sage Foun¬
dation, Hugh Cline, used to teach computing at
Columbia.

It's probably the same in industry. In other
words. more and more. for better and Cor worse,
things are being run by people who know how to
use computers, and this trend is probably irre¬
versible .

In some ways, of course, this is a sinister
portent. In private industry it's not so bad,
since the danger is more of embezzlement and
botch-up than of public menace. But then there’B
the problem of the government. The men who
manage the information tools are more and more
in charge of government, too. And if we can have
a Watergate without computers, just wait. (See
"Burning Issues," p. 5" g)

The way to defend ourselves against computer
people is to become computer people ourselves,
Which of course is the point. We must all become
computer people, at least to the extent that we have
already become Automobile People and Camera
People— that is, informed enough to tell when one
goes by or when someone points one at you.

MANY MANSIONS

The future is going to be full of computers,
for good or ill. Many computer systems are being
prepared by a variety of lunatics, idealists and
dreamers, as well as profit-hungry companies and
unimaginative clods, all for the benefit of mankind.
Which ones will work and which ones we will like is
another matter. The grand and dreamy ones bid fair
to reorganize drastically the lives of mankind.

For instance, Doug Engelbart at Stanford
Research Institute has a beautiful system, called NLS,
that will allow us to use computers as a generalized
poatoffice and publication system. From your com¬
puter terminal you just sign onto Engelbert's System,
and you're at once in touch with lots of writings by
other subscribers, which you may call to your
screen and write replies to.

(These grander and dreamier applications are
discussed on the other side of this book.)

But the plain computer visions are grand
enough.

MINI MANSIONS

But while computers and their combinations
grow bigger and bigger, they also grow smaller
and smaller, a complete computer the size of an
Oreo cookie is now available, guaranteed for
twentyfive years (and very expensive). But its
actual heart, the Intel microprocessor, is only
sixty bucks now , and just wait (see Microprocessors,
P ■ */*/)■ By 1980 there should be as many pro¬
grammed and programmable objects in your house
as you now have TVs, radios and typewriters;
that's a conservative estimate. But JuBt what these
devices will all be doing— ah, there's the question
that has many people talking to themselves.

OTHER COMING THINGS?

There are a lot of tall stories about what
computers will do for the world. Among the most
threatening, I think, are glowing reports of
"scientific" politics (don't you believe it). We
hear how computers will bring "science" to govern¬
ment, helping, for example, to redraw the lines of
election districts. (See Cybercrud. p. .)

Then you may also have heard that computers
are going to be our new mentors and companions,
tutoring us, chatting with us and perhaps lulling us
to sleep— like Hal in 2001 . Worried? Good.

(See "The God-Buildersflip side.) (K ,6*\ 'lA

OfOTZWt Jxwnpjv

A college student broke through the security of the
Pacific Telephone computer system from a terminal and,
according to Computerworld (6 June 73), stole over a
million dollars worth of equipment by ordering it
delivered to him! ( Penthouse , December 73, claims he
was in highschool and it was only nine hundred thousand,
but you get the idea.)

After serving a few weeks in jail, he has formed
his own computer-security consulting company.

More power to him.

The new breed has got to be watched.

This is the urgency of this book. Remember
that the man who writes the payroll program can
write himself some pretty amazing checks-- perhaps
to be mailed out to Switzerland, next year.

From here on it's computer politics, computer
dirty tricks, computer wonderlands, computer
everything.

For anyone concerned to be where it's at,
then, this book will provide a few suggestions.

Now is the time you either know or you don't.

Enough power talk. Knowledge is power.
Here you go. Dig in.

There have been instances where dishonest
university students, nevertheless able programmers,
were able to change their course grades, stored
on a ceikral university computer.

It is not unheard of for ace programmer a to
create grand incomprehensible systems that run
whole companies, systems they can personally play
like a piano, and ihen blackmail their firms.

A friend of a friend of the author is an ace
programmer at the Pentagon, supposedly a private
supervising colonels. On days he is mad at his
boas, he says, the army cannot find out its strength
within 300,000 men. Or three million if he so
chooses.

This awkward Btate of affairs. obviously
spanning both the American continent and moet
realms of endeavor, has come about for various

reasons.

First, the climate of uncomprehension leads
men in management to treat computer matters as
"mere technicalities"— a myth aa sinister as the
public notion that computers are "scientific"--
and abandon the kind of scrutiny they sensibly
apply to any other company activities.

Second . most of today's computer systems are
inherently leaky and insecure-- and likely to stay
that way awhile. Getting things to work on them
involves giving people extraordinary and invisible
powers. (Eventually this will change, but watch
out for the meantime.)

The great world of time-sharing, for instance.
("Time-sharing" means that the computer’s time is
shared by a variety of users simultaneously. See
p. ■/?.) If you have an account on a time-sharing
computer, you can sign on from your terminal
(see p. f>j ) over any telephone, no matter where
you are, and at once do anything that particular
computer allows— calling up programs in a variety
of computer languages, dipping into data on a
variety of subjects as easily as one now consults
a chart.

For instance, at Dartmouth College— where
time-sharing is perhaps farthest advanced as a
way of life-- the user (any Dartmouth student, for
instance) can juBt sit down at a terminal and write
a simple program (in Dartmouth's BASIC language,
for instance) to analyze census data. Since Dart¬
mouth has a complete file on its time-sharing system
of the detailed sample from the 1970 census, the
program can buzz through that and report almost
immediately the numbers of divorced Aleuts or
boy millionaires in the sample, or (more signifi¬
cantly) the relative incomes of different ethnic
groups when categorized according to the ques¬
tioner's interests.

But simple time-sharing ia only the beginning.
Networks of computers are now coming into being.
Most significant of these is the ARPANET (financed
by ARPA, the Defense Department's Advanced
Research Projects Agency. It Is nonetheless non¬
military in character). Dozens of large time-shartng
computers around the country are being tied into the
Arpanet, and a user of any of these can reach dir¬
ectly into the other computers of the network-
using their programs , data or other facilities.
Arpanet enthusiasts see this aa the wave of the
future.

LES&lU:

GCTTlNfr THINGS HEIGHT

The greatest hurdle for the beginner (or
"layman") is making an effort to grasp particulars
of that which he hears about.

A. WHAT IS ITS NAME? Every system or
proposal or project has a name of some sort. Make
an effort to learn it, or you're stuck trying to refer
to "that computerish thing."

(And don't be a snob about acronyms, those
all-cap names and terms sprung from the foreheads
of other words. like ILL1AC and PLATO and CAi.
There’s a need for them. Short words are too
general to use for names. and long phrases are
too unwieldy.)

B. IN WHAT PARTICULAR WAV DOES IT
EMPLOY THE COMPUTER? For record-keeping?

For looking stuff up quickly or fancily? For
searching out combinations? For making up combi¬
nations ana testing their properties’ For enacting
complex phenomena? As automatic typewriters?

To play music, or just to store the written notes?

It is hoped that you will become sensitive
to these distinctions, and be able to understand and
remember them after somebody explains them.

Otherwise you're stuck juat referring to
"that computer buslneaa," and you're in with the
rest of the sheep.

This side of the book , Computer Lib proper (whose title is nevertheless
the simplest way to refer to both halves) , is an attempt to explain simply and
concisely why computers are marvelous and wonderful, and what some main
things are in the field ,

The second half of the book, Dream Machines , is specially about fantasy
and imagination, and new techniques for it, That half is related to this half,
but can be read first; I wanted to separate them as distinctly as possible.

The remarks below all refer to this first half, the Computer Lib half
of the book.

FANDOM

With this book I am no longer calling myself a computer
professional. I’m a computer fan, and I’m out to make you
one. (All computer professionals were fans once, but people
get crabbier as they gel older, and more professional.)

A generation of computer fans and hobbyists is well on
its way, but for the most part these are people who have
had some sort of an In, This is meant to be an In for those
who didn't get one earlier.

Tht computer fan is someone who appreciates the
options, fun, excitement, and fiendish fascination of computers.
Not only is the computer fun in itself, like electric trains;
but it also extends to you a wide variety of possible personal
uses. (In case you don't know it, the price of computers
and of using them Is going down as faBt as every other
price is going up. So in the next few decades we may be
reduced to eating soybeans and carrots, but we'll certainly
have computers,)

Somehow the idea is abroad that computer activities
are uncreative, aa compared, say, with rotating clay against
your fingers until it becomes a pot. This is categorically
false. Computers involve imagination and creation at the
highest level. Computers are an involvement you can really
get into, regardless of your trip or your karma. They
are toys, they are tools, they are glorious abstractions.

So it you like mental creation, toy trains, or abstractions,
computers are for you. If you are interested in democracy
and its future, you’d better understand computers. And
it you are concerned about power and the way it is being
used, and aren't we all right now, the same thing goes.

THE SOCIETY

Which brings us to our next topic.

There is no question of whether the computer will
remake society; it has. You deal with computers perhaps
many times a day-- or worse, computers deal with you ,
though you may not know it. Computers are going into
everything, are intertwined with everything, and it's going
to get more and more so. The reader should have a sense
of the dance of options, the remarkably different way6
that computers may be used; by extension, he should come
to see the extraordinary range of options which confront
ua as a society in our future use of them. Indeed, computers
have with a swoop expanded the options of everything.

But a variety of inconvenient systems already touch on
our lives, nuisances we must deal with all the time; and
1 fear that worse is to come. I would like to alert the reader,
in no uncertain terms, that the time has come to be openly
attentive and critical in observing and dealing with computer
systems; and to transform criticism into action. If systems
are bad, annoying and demeaning, these matters should
be brought to the attention of the perpetrators. Politely
at first. But just as the atmospheric pollution fostered by
GM has become a matter for citizen concern and attack through
legitimate channels of protest, so too should the procedural
pollution of inconsiderate computer systems become a matter
for the same kinds of concern. The reader should realize he
can criticize and demand;

THE PUBLIC DOES NOT HAVE TO TAKE
WHAT'S BEING DISHED OUT.

There is already a backlash against computers, and
the spirit of this anti-computer backlash is correct, but
should be directed against very specific kinds of things.

The public should stop being mad at "computers" in the
abstract, and start being mad at the people who make in¬
convenient systems. It is not "the computer,” which has
no Intrinsic style or character, which is at fault; it is people
who use "the computer" as an excuse to inconvenience you,
who are at fault. The mechanisms of legitimate public
protest-- sit-ins and soon— should perhaps soon be turned
to complaint over bad and inhuman computer systems.

The question is, will the crummier trends continue?
Or can the public learn, in time, what good and beautiful
things are possible, and translate this realization into an
effective demand? I do not believe this is an obscure or
specialized issue. Its shadow falls across the future of
mankind, if any , like a giant sequoia. Either computer
systems are going to go on inconveniencing our lives, or
they are going to be turned around to make life better.

This is one of the directions that consumerism should turn.

I have an axe to grind: I want to see computers useful
to individuals, and the sooner the better, without necessary
complication or human servility being required. Anyone
who agrees with these principles is on my side, and anyone
who does not, is not.

THIS BOOK IS FOR PERSONAL FREEDOM,

AND AGAINST RESTRICTION AND COERCION.

That's really all it's about. Many people, for reasons of
their own, enjoy and believe in restricting and coercing
people; the reader may decide whether he is for or against
this principle.

A chant you can take to the streets;

COMPUTER POWER TO THE PEOPLE!

DOWN WITH CYBERCRUD!

THE FUTURE. IF ANY

Simply as a matter of citizenship, it is essential to
understand the impact and uses of computers in the world
of the future, if any; and to have a sense of the issues about
computers that confront us as a people-- especially privacy
and data banks, but also strange new additions to our
economic system ("the checkless society"), our political
system (half-baked vote-at-home proposals), and so on.

1 regret that there is not room to cover these here.

Various companies are seeking wide public support for
the sorts of things they are trying to bring about. Legislation
will be proposed on which the views of the public should
have a bearing. It is important that these be understood
sensibly by some part of the electorate before they are made
too permanent, rather than made matters of dumb assent.

Finally, and most solemnly, computers are helping
us understand the unprecedented danger of our future
(see "The Club of Rome," p .&j). The human race may
have only a short time left on earth, even if there is no war.
These studies must be seen and understood by as many
intelligent men of good will as possible.

THEREFORE

Welcome to the computer world, the damndest and
craziest thing that has ever happened. But we. the computer
people. are not crazy. It is you others who are crazy to
let us have all this fun and power to ourselves.

COMPUTERS BELONG TO ALL MANKIND.

B.A., philosophy, Bwarthmore; graduate study U. of Chicago; M.A., sociology. Harvard. Mostly self-taught in computers.
Member of editorial board, Computer Decialona magazine; listed in New York Times' Who’s Who in Computer s; member o
Association for Computing Machinery since 1964.

1967-8.

Research assistant. Communication Reaeurch Institute. 1962-3. Instructor in sociology. Vassar College. 1964-6. ,

Senior staff researcher. Harcourt. Brace a World Publishers. 1966-7. Consultant to Bell Telephone Laboratories, Whippany . ■

Consultant to CBS Laboratories, Stamford. Cl.. 196B-9. Proprietor of The Nelson Organization, Inc., New York ty,

Lecturer in ert, II. of Illinois at Chicago Circle, spring _ ...... of Illinois at Chicago Circle. 1973*4. FMO by Fi.ld.

Lecturer in computer education. Office of Instructional Resources Development,

(WUTER |i&

rc)lt7'l Ue 9 ^H

Additional copies are $7 postpaid fro«
Hugo's Book. Service, Box 2622 ,
Chicago, Illinois 60690.

Package of ten copies, $50 postpaid.

Any nitwit can understand computers, and many do.
Unfortunately, due to ridiculous historical circumstances,
computers have been made a mystery to most of the world.

And this situation does not seem to be improving. You
hear more and more about computers, but to most people
it's just one big blur. The people who know about computers
often seem unwilling to explain things or answer your ques¬
tions . Stereotyped notions develop about computers operating
in fixed ways-- and so confusion increases. The chasm
between laymen and computer people widens fast and danger¬
ously .

This book is a measure of desperation, so serious
and abysmal is the public sense of confusion and ignorance.
Anything with buttons or lights can be palmed off on the
layman as a computer. There are so many different things,
and their differences are so important; yet to the lay public
they are lumped together as "computer stuff." indistinct
and beyond understanding or criticism. It's as if people
couldn't tell apart camera from exposure meter or tripod,
or car from truck or tollbooth. This book is therefore devoted
to the premise that

EVERYBODY SHOULD UNDERSTAND COMPUTERS.

It is intended to fill a crying need. Lots of everyday people
have asked me where they can learn about computers, and
I have had to say nowhere . Most of what is written about
computers for the layman is either unreadable or silly.

(Some exceptions are listed nearby; you can go to them
instead of this if you want.) But virtually nowhere is the
big picture simply enough explained. Nowhere can one
get a simple, soup-to-nuts overview of what computers
are really about, without technical or mathematical mumbo-
jumbo, complicated examples , or talking down. This book
is an attempt.

(And nowhere have I seen a simple book explaining
to the layman the fabulous wonderland of computer graphics
which awaits us all, a matter which means a great deal
to me personally, as well as a lot to all of us in general.

That's discussed on the flip side.)

Computers are simply a necessary and enjoyable
part of life, like food and books. Computers are not everything,
they are just an aspect of everything, and not to know this
is computer illiteracy, a silly and dangerous ignorance.

Computers are as easy to understand as cameras.

I have tried to make this book like a photography magazine—
breezy, forceful and as vivid as possible. This book will
explain how to tell apples from oranges and which way
is up. If you went to make cider, or help get things right
side up, you will have to go on from here.

I am not a skillful programmer. hands-on person
or eminent professional; 1 am just a computer fan, computer
fanatic if you will. But if Dr. David Reuben can write about
sex I can certainly write about computers. 1 have written
this like a letter to a nephew , chatty and personal. This
is perhaps less boring for the reader, and certainly less
boring for the writer, who is doing this in a hurry. Like
a photography magazine, it throws at you some rudiments
in a merry setting. Other things are thrown in so you'll
get the sound of them, even if the details are elusive.

(We learn most everyday things by beginning with vague
impressions, but somehow encouraging these is not usually
felt to be respectable.) What I have chosen for inclusion
here has been arbitrary, based on what might amuse and
give quick insight. Any bright highschool kid. or anyone
else who can stumble through the details of a photography
magazine, should be able to understand this book. or get
the main ideas. This will not make you a programmer or
a computer person, though it may help you talk that talk.
and perhaps make you feel more comfortable (or at least
able to cope) when new machine# encroach on your life.

If you can get a chance to learn programming- - Bee the
suggestion# on p. -- it’s an awfully good experience for

anybody above fourth grade But the main idea of this
book ia to help you tell apples from oranges . and which
way la up. 1 hope you do go on from here, and have made
a few suggestions.

I am "publishing" this book myself, l n this first
draft form, to test its viability, to see how mad the computer
people get, and to see if there is as much hunger to understand
computers, among all you Folks Out There, ## ] think.

I will be interested to receive corrections and suggestions
for aubaequent editions. If any. (The computer field Is
its own exploding universe . so I'll worry about up-to-dateness
at that time )

M/jK* OF THU

Man has created the myth of "the computer" in his own image,
or one of them; cold, immaculate, sterile, "scientific," oppressive.

Some people flee this image. Others, drawn toward it. have
joined the cold-sterile-oppressive cult, and propagate it like a faith.
Many are still about this mischief, making people do things rigidly
and BBying it is the computer's fault.

Still others see computer> for what they really are: versatile
gizmos which may be turned to any purpose, in any style. And so
a wealth of new styles and human purposes are being proposed and
tried, each proponent propounding his own dream in his own very
personal way.

This book presents a panoply of things and dreams. Perhaps
some will appeal to the reader. ..

THE COMPUTER PRIESTHOOD

Knowledge is power and so it tends to be hoarded.
Experts in any field rarely want people to understand what
they do,and generally enjoy putting people down.

Thus if we say that the use of computers is dominated
by a priesthood, people who spatter you with unintelligable
answers and seem unwilling to give you straight ones,
it is not that they are different in this respect from any
other profession. Doctors, lawyers and construction engineers
are the same way.

But computers are very special, and we have to deal
with them everywhere, and this effectively gives the computer
priesthood a stranglehold on the operation of all large organiza¬
tions. of government bureaux, and anything else that they
run. Members of Congress are now complaining about
control of information by the computer people, that they
cannot get the information even though it's on computers.

Next to this it seems a small matter that in ordinary companies
"untrained" personnel can't get straight questions answered
by computer people; but it's the same phenomenon.

It is imperative for many reasons that the appalling
gap between public and computer insider be closed. As
the saying goes, war is too important to be left to the generals.
Guardianship of the computer can no longer be left to a
priesthood. I see this as just one example of the creeping
evil of Professionalism ,* the control of aspects of society
by cliques of insiders . There may be some chance, though,
that Professionalism can be turned around. Doctors, for
example, are being told that they no longer own people's
bodies . ** And this book may suggest to some computer
professionals that their position should not be as sacrosanct
as they have thought, cither.

This in not to say that computer people are trying
to louse everybody up on purpose. Like anyone trying
to do a complex job as he sees fit, they don’t want to be
bothered with idle questions and complaints. Indeed, probab¬
ly arty group of insiders would have hoarded computers
just as much. If the computer had evolved from the telegraph
(which it just might have), perhaps the librarians would
have hoarded it conceptually as much as the math and en¬
gineering people have. But things have gone too far.

People have legitimate complaints about the way computers
are used. and legitimate ideas for ways they should be
used, which should no longer be shunted aside.

ln no way do I mean to condemn computer people
in general. (Only the ones who don't want you to know
what's going on.) The field is full of fine, imaginative
people. Indeed, the number of creative and brilliant people
known within the field for their clever and creative contri¬
butions is considerable. They deserve to be known as widely
as . say , good photographers or writers .

"Computers are catching hell from growing multitudes
who see them uniformly as the tools of the
regulation and suffocation of all things warm,
moist, and human. The charges, of course,
are not totally unfounded, but in their most
sweeping form they are ineffective and therefore
actually an acquiescence to the dehumanization
which they decry. We clearly need a much more
discerning evaluation in order to clarify the
ethics of various roles of machines in human
affairs."

Ken Knowlton

in "Collaborations with Artists--

a Programmer's Reflections"
in Nake t Rosenfeld, eds. ,

Graphic Languages
(North-Holland Pub. Co.),
p. 399.

• This is a side point. I see Professionalism aa a spreading
disease of the present-day world, a sort of poly-oligarchy
by which various groups (subway conductors, social workers,
bricklayers) can bring things to a halt if their particular
new increased demands are not met. (Meanwhile, the irrele¬
vance of each profession increases, in proportion to Its
increasing rigidity.) Such lucky groups demand more
in each go-round- - but meantime, the number who are
permanently unemployed grows and grows.

*• Ellen Frankfort . Vaginal Politics. Quadrangle Books
Boston Women’s Health Collective, Our Bodies . Ourselves.
Simon a Schuster.

J)ou*ex.

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